


You're Like, The Magic Twins or Something

by Jalules



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Demonic Possession, Gen, I don't even want to put it in the relationship tags but one-sided gideon/mabel, Magic, Minor Body Horror, Sibling Bonding, Supernatural Creatures, Supernatural Elements, Tattoos, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, brief reference to alcohol, brief reference to mind control, brief references to vomiting, in case that bothers anyone, magic twins au, original background characters - Freeform, underage tattooing is there no tag for that?
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-10-26
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-22 15:27:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 21
Words: 47,907
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2512604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jalules/pseuds/Jalules
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Pines twins make a pact to never let anyone control or manipulate them again; a series of loosely connected one-shots that are not quite as serious as they might seem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Con

**Author's Note:**

> The pieces herein are informal ficlets of varied lengths, based in an AU I've loosely titled the 'Magic Twins' AU, brought over from tumblr. 
> 
> For a full understanding of the idea, I'd recommend checking out the original (messy) post about it which can be found [here.](http://jalules.tumblr.com/post/100553964921/gravity-falls-au-where-the-pines-twins-make-a-pact)  
> These might get shuffled around and reworked later (maybe it belongs in a collection rather than a chapter style fic?,) but for now I'm just having fun with it all.

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Dipper is 14 when he does it, The Con.

He’s been thinking about it for a long time; a year and three weeks, if his notes are accurate, and let’s face it, no one’s notes are as accurate as Dipper’s.

Ever since they went back to school after that first summer in Gravity Falls, the summer he came face to face with all manner of paranormal phenomena but most notoriously a dream demon, he’s been doing research. Thinking. Planning.

He does it because he’s sure he’s got his facts straight, every failsafe in place. Because he’s tired of feeling like the world could end at any moment. Because he’s impatient and likes the feeling of vengeance and if he’s being totally honest with himself, because he’s jealous.

Because Mabel took to her end of their pact to stay in control like a fish to water. She hunted down the shattered pieces of Gideon’s amulet and pieced them back together to see what they’d do and even though it wouldn’t work as a whole, she got the gist of how it all came together (and made a really nice mosaic vase with the broken stone pieces.)

And she’s kept it up ever since, building her first piece of enchanted jewelry using a Little Miss Sparkle Factory kit and an incantation she made up out of thin air. She traded a signed Sev’ral Timez album at the local pawn shop to pick up a ring that glows bright white in its center when she slips it on her finger. She’s added pieces to her small but growing collection from wherever she can find them; out in the woods, in glass thrift shop cases, from that one museum that never even noticed her swiping the brooch from a display (and really they’re better off without it anyway, it could have hurt someone.)

Dipper watches her put on a pair of earrings that make her eyes glow blue, her hair float free like a living thing behind her, and starts to think she might actually be a witch, the way these items just take to her.

And she’s more than willing to share of course, and he’s got the pendant for protection she made him on between layers of fabric at all times, against bare skin even when he showers (which he does willingly, thank you very much, despite what certain twin sisters will lead you to believe.)

But he doesn’t really want a bunch of magic jewelry. He appreciates it, especially when he’s getting stared down by an angry elf-thing that wants to tear into him and can’t because he’s got a bunch of iron and rune coded nonsense radiating off his chest. He appreciates it  _a lot_.

He wants his own thing, though. His own magic thing. His own contribution to the mutual looking out they do for each other, something more than a book of half-answers and boatload of determination.

So he goes for it, the plan he likes to consider The Con.

Out in the woods, far enough away from the Mystery Shack that it’ll take Mabel a while to find him, even following the notes he left behind, he makes his arrangements.

Candles, check.

Photocopied journal page, check.

Pillow, check.

And that’s it, really. That’s all you need to summon a powerful dream demon. The pillow isn’t required, but he figures it’s a good idea to have since he’ll be out cold for the majority of the plan.

So he summons Bill Cipher and they catch up, they banter. They rehash everything from that first summer with equal frustration on both ends, with Dipper trying not to look too afraid and Bill constantly encroaching further and further into his personal space. Dipper loses his temper but keeps talking in the circles he’s scripted and Bill laughs and laughs and keeps on laughing till he starts to notice what Dipper’s up to.

He catches on fast. It’s tricky from there, exploiting loophole after loophole to back the demon further into a corner, pulling out all the stops and feeling the rush, the thrill that comes from getting over on this being of unlimited cosmic power.

The look of sheer rage on Bill’s one-eyed face, the terrifying, satisfying _fury_ -

Ah, but that’s another story. Never mind. Anyway.

When Dipper wakes up it’s to Mabel calling his name.

All the candles have burnt out and he’s cold in the woods at twilight, should have brought a blanket too.

He sits up, disoriented as all get out, and Mabel is on him in an instant.

She punches him in the arm, repeatedly, so much harder than necessary, and all her shining, whispering spirit-bangles clank together and shriek at him while she yells too, all red in the face.

“Dipper what did you  _do_?” She cries, and only stops hitting at him when he fights back, smacking at open air with no real intent to hit her.

She knows exactly what he did. He’s been talking about it for months, even in his sleep, and before he can answer she’s berating him for doing something so dangerous, for doing it  _alone_.

And that’s the operative word, isn’t it?

They’re supposed to be in this together.

He can’t make excuses. He knows he’s in the wrong. He apologizes, a little, but he also thinks he might throw up and telling her that makes her scoot back awfully fast.

He doesn’t throw up.

He does ask how he looks, to which Mabel quickly responds, “Like a bigger nerd than usual.”

And he panics, thinking of horns and spikes, of a single eye, or pyramid-bricked skin or demon horns or something else awful.

So Mabel pulls a holographic cat-decorated compact mirror out of the pocket of her jean skirt and holds it up for him to see his reflection which is-

Normal.

Plain old Dipper Pines. Still in need of a haircut. Same face, same body, same hat. Even his birthmark is there, same as he remembers.

And Mabel asks, carefully, less angry now that her brother isn’t maybe-hurt, maybe-dying, definitely without her, “Did it even work?”

And Dipper knows it must have worked,  _had_  to have worked because he took every variable into account, knew every possible outcome. It had to have worked or else the whole Con was for nothing.

The disappointment must show on his face because Mabel pouts, puts down her mirror. She puts her arms around him in a too-tight, awkward sibling hug and says, “Oh Dipper…”

The sleeve of her sweater is covered in fur from an afternoon spent snuggling the Corduroy’s giant hunting dog, and he inhales half of it as Mabel hugs him.

He sneezes.

Like a kitten.

And Mabel shrieks.

She jumps back from him, pointing frantically, making noises that are more yodel than words, and when Dipper looks down to see what she’s getting at his hands are on fire.

Just blue fire. It doesn’t hurt.

But it does look awfully familiar.

He shrieks then too, and they shriek at each other for a while, disturbing the local wildlife and causing a scene until Mabel pulls out her mirror again, bouncing excitedly where she sits.

“Look at your eyes!” She tells him, and they look normal to him, the same brown as Mabel’s, as their mom’s, but when he clenches his fists and tries to feel that blue fire, they glow.

Blue. Like Mabel’s when she’s floating two feet off the ground with a magic amulet around her neck. Like magic.

“We’re twins now!” She yells at him, grinning ear to ear, and the statement is so ridiculous he starts laughing, starts her laughing, and they collapse to a giggling pile of relief.

They leave the candles, take the pillow and the photocopy, and head back to the shack.

They stay up all night testing Dipper’s weird powers, freaking out when the world turns sideways accidentally, when he vanishes and reappears without meaning to.

He only throws up once.

Mabel says his powers seem kind of useless, no offense, But with a lot of concentration he manages to make a little ball of blue energy between his hands and hey, that’s got to be something, right?

When Grunkle Stan finds them in the kitchen in the morning Dipper is standing on the table in a circle of silverware, Mabel is throwing salt at him and laughing and chanting “Out, dark spirit!,” and he really, really doesn’t even want to know. 

.

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	2. The Haul

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It’s too early in the morning for anyone to want to be up, but the Mystery Shack is already awake.

Mabel sits at the kitchen table, hunched over an array of tiny plastic bags holding magic gems, with Grunkle Stan’s jeweler’s loupe held to her eye, checking colors and labels, while her brother paces around the room, mug in hand, talking a mile a minute.

Sure, don’t give  _Mabel_  any coffee,  _she’s_  the hyperactive one. Psh.

Dipper is reviewing his notes and making a chart, not so much for wannabe-professional reasons, but because the two of them have this sort of competition going on. It started with an offhand comment about saving his butt way too many times for him not to take better care of himself with some much needed sleep, and escalated to rehashing every heroic rescue each of them has pulled off in the past five or so years.

Mabel’s already over it to be honest, she’s got more important things to be doing, orders and gifts to be packing up and delivering. Dipper tends towards obsession, though.

“Okay,” He says, and clicks his pen and jots something down on paper, “So you have the time with the clay, and I have the time with the choker, and the time with the glue trap.”

Mabel nods, half-listening. She counts the number of shining blue and green beads on a string inside one labeled bag and puts it aside. Order 216, check.

She reminds Dipper about the time with the chandelier.

He pulls a face and goes kind of pink and grumbles as he writes that one down on her side of the chart, the one with a glittering line under her name.

And Mabel laughs. She thinks they probably shouldn’t make a competition out of saving each other, since it’s just kind of a thing they do, but it is sort of fun to remind Dipper of some of his more hilarious screw ups. And it doesn’t hurt to be reminded how many times she’s made use of a grappling hook, either.

They’ve traded off over the years on this, the rescuing thing, from the time Mabel threw a block at their pre-school classmate for making fun of her brother’s birthmark to just last week when Dipper stormed a stalagmite castle to fight the crystal soldier kidnapping his sister. They look out for each other, stand up for each other, and more recently, make sure the other one doesn’t get killed or banished to a dark dimension.

Mabel almost,  _almost_  misses when it was simpler. When she could roll up her sleeves to scare somebody off. When she could make a friend out of a playground enemy.

That only works about half the time in Gravity Falls.

But Gravity Falls is where her brother really starts to shine.

Out here in the woods, with all the weird and whacky things that happen, Dipper is in his element. He’s got a journal full of secrets and a head full of ideas and now he can flip reality on its side, and sometimes Mabel actually has trouble keeping up, sort of did even before the demon powers came into play.

She’s happy for him, that he’s found a place that fits. He has a hard time at home, sometimes.

“Ah!” Dipper cries, trying and failing to levitate at her side. He still can’t get the hang of it, ends up balancing on one foot more often than not, “That time with the centaurs!”

Mabel thinks that was more of a joint effort.

“You think everything was a joint effort,” Dipper says, but he smiles and doesn’t write anything down.

Mabel thinks maybe she fits into everywhere, a little bit, which is part luck and part skill.

Her grade school report cards always said the same things; that she’s creative, friendly, kind.

It’s still true. The creativity is what helps her make more and more impressive jewelry pieces with every day of practice, the kindness is what makes her give half of them away.

Dipper’s warned her time and again that someday it’s going to come back to bite her, but she reasons these pieces are only a  _teeny_ bit magical and no one will even mind. All of the big magic goes to the ones who can handle it, the supernatural creatures that have started knocking on their door, looking for help in this big, scary, constantly changing world.

Mabel feels for them, wants to help them out. She feels for non-magical people too, though the average person only ever gets a good luck charm. They don’t usually need much more.

So far no one’s tried to burn her as a witch.

Everybody in town figures she’s just into healing crystals and new age mumbo jumbo. Which she kind of totally is because it kind of totally works.

Mabel knows her stuff. She’s a magical gem expert these days.

She is not, like Dipper’s report cards always said, brilliant.  She can’t read as fast as her brother, or retain as much information as he can. She can’t do calculus to save her life, or keep a timeline of historical facts straight, but she can put together a magic bracelet and a super cute outfit and put on a smile that makes people want to say hello and stick around.

She can bat her eyelashes adorably enough to make just about anyone give her just about anything she asks for, but that isn’t a skill that gets touted on report cards.

Dipper warns her about that too, and she’ll admit, he has a point. Being cute and charming can get you into trouble. But they both have a bad habit of getting into trouble, don’t they?

“I don’t make goo-goo eyes at people though,” Dipper always insists, all flustered and puffed up to preserve his so-called masculinity, and Mabel just laughs because he  _totally_   _does_ he just doesn’t realize when he’s doing it.

He doesn’t realize when he finally manages to levitate either, and Mabel doesn’t say a word when he starts floating a little off the ground, not wanting to break his concentration and make him fall.

As funny as that would be, she’d never hear the end of it.

Mabel takes inventory while her brother wracks his brain for times he’s saved Mabel’s bacon.

Laid out across the table she’s got…

The glamoured cuff links for that nice old vampire down the road who just wants to keep under cover.

And a pair of dangling earrings that tinkle like wind chimes without wind, which she changes her mind about, decides to put on herself because A, they’re pretty and B, they’re haunted and whisper death threats to whoever wears them, and even though she just giggles when they hiss about how they’re going destroy her soul, someone else might be weirded out.

She’s got a puzzle ring for Wendy’s youngest brother who really doesn’t need any magic, just something to keep him busy so he won’t wreck the house on rainy days.

She’s got a good luck charm for Grenda, who’s going on a first date on Tuesday (she asked for a beauty charm or a charming charm or whatever it is that’ll make her irresistible, but Mabel insists on just good luck. Grenda is lovely all on her own.)

And a new healing stone for Grunkle Stan’s bad back, because as much as he grumbled about it being a bunch of malarkey when she slipped the last one into his pocket, he’s been complaining less and less about being unable to get out of bed.

She’s got a plain old shiny ring for the hobgoblin that’s taken over Pacifica Northwest’s basement, and she’s not going to tell Dipper about that one because he still makes a face whenever she does a favor for Pacifica, even though they are sort of friends now, on a good day.

They’ve been a little closer ever since she loaned Pacifica an invisibility ring, so she could wear it around her house to see if her parents would notice her missing.

(They didn’t.)

And when Pacifica brought it back to throw it in Mabel’s face, she had a bowl of muddy buddies prepared and a bridal show marathon on tv and she wanted to share them both, so Pacifica just sat down next to her instead, ring clutched tight in her shaking hand.

They’re probably definitely friends now, no matter what Dipper says.

Dipper says a lot of things that Mabel ignores, after all. He says she shouldn’t keep the vase she made with the broken pieces of Gideon’s amulet at her bedside, in case it has bad juju in it or something, but Mabel would  _know_  if it had bad juju and besides, she likes it there.

As if Dipper has any room to talk anyway, Mr.’Take My Enemy’s Powers Into Myself and Just See What Happens.’

That’s not Mabel’s idea of a good time.

She likes magic that enhances and helps, but not changes. She doesn’t like a lot of change.

She’s relieved, so relieved, that Dipper hasn’t changed. Much. He’s taller now, but still not as tall as her. The teleportation thing is new too, but at least it’s kind of cool and really funny to see him flip out every time he jumps a foot to the left by blinking.

She’s tried loaning him pendants for staying power, for steadying the spirit, for righting his footing, but nothing seems to help. Her magic can protect Dipper from other people, it seems, but not from whatever’s working inside himself.

“Two words,” Dipper says, “Syprup festival.”

Which is not even fair. Not. Even. Fair.

She reminds Dipper of the water park fiasco, to which he says, “What?” and Mabel clarifies- she was trying to save his  _love_  life.

She drums her hands on the tabletop in a makeshift rimshot,  _ba-dum-tsh!_

Grunkle Stan yells down the hall for them to be quiet while Dipper’s ears go pink.

“Not. Even. Fair,” He says.

He shouldn’t have brought up the Syrup Festival then.

Mabel slides the plastic seal in place across a bag of loose beads, drops them quick so they don’t try to bust out of the container and string themselves into her hair.

That’d be a mess, for sure.

She asks if all the times she’s summoned him away from an angry mob in the nick of time count as life-saving rescues, and Dipper grudgingly makes a note of it-  _summoning, x5._

Five? Probably closer to fifteen.

She asks if he wants to come along to deliver today’s orders and he hesitates, mumbles something about wanting to finish this stupid chart.

She says she’s visiting  _nixies_ , and Dipper’s feet hit the floor before he realizes he was ever above it. He looks at her like she’s a miracle, not just magic.

“You found the nixies?”

More like they found her.

Mabel gathers up her plastic bags full of magic and shoves a handful at Dipper, so he has to carry those instead of a crowded page of notes.

She pulls him out the door by the hand while he brings up the time she put on a bracelet that got their hands stuck together for twenty-four hours, and she sings to drown him out.

She thinks, but doesn’t say, that the number of times they’ve saved each other doesn’t matter, as long as the fact remains that they  _have_  saved each other.

She’ll tell him so later, so he won’t look like a big, sensitive doofus in front of the nixies.

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	3. The Mark

 

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.

When the twins are fifteen and hanging out with Wendy for her last summer in gravity falls before she leaves to, you know, backpack across Europe and find herself or whatever, they explain to her how frustrating it is that their parents won’t let them get tattoos.

Because a few simple symbols would make summoning  _so_  much easier, and they’d be really small, and Dipper thinks they’d look realy really cool, and Mabel is totally down for matching _anything_ , but no they’re not allowed.

(Demon magic and floating jewelry, fine, the Pines parents can take that. It helps that they don’t really  _look_ magical _._  But no way are their kids getting tattoos, they’re teenagers for goodness sake!)

And Wendy can see where the twins are coming from, both on a magical perspective and because Dipper is totally right, tattoos would be sick.

And you know, she just happens to have some tattooing equipment that one of her dad’s biker friend types left over at their house, which she totally knows how to use because she’s practiced on like, fruit and pig ears and stuff, and it’s right in the shed if by any chance they want her to go get it…

And Mabel screams “YES,” and Dipper asks “Is that legal?” and Wendy shrugs.

Everything is legal when there’s no cops around.

(Stan will be so, so proud.)

So that’s how the Pines twins end up at Wendy Corduroy’s house getting at-home tattooed.

Dipper gets the smallest possible sigil on his back, where you can’t see it as long as he’s got a shirt on (and let’s be honest he never really wants to take his shirt off, he won’t even take it off to let Wendy do the damn thing, just holds the fabric out of the way) and he doesn’t pass out even a little while it’s happening.

Mabel gets hers behind her ear (it’s covered by her hair anyway, who cares?) and doesn’t even wait for it to stop stinging before she’s trying to summon her brother with it even though he’s only, "-two feet away, Mabel, stop pulling, you're gonna break the universe!" 

Dipper does pass out a little then, from the summoning, not the tatooing, but Wendy props him up on a pile of her old stuffed animals and Mabel swears up and down he’ll be fine in like, ten minutes, promise, "And could you pass me something to use as a fan?"

And Wendy thinks she did a pretty good job, for an amateur, and hey, maybe she should look into doing this for a living.

The tattooing thing, not the taking care of magical teenagers thing

That is definitely not a thing to do for a living.

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	4. The Catch

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It isn’t long after he gets his powers that Dipper starts sleep walking.

Sleep _stalking_ , Mabel calls it, and laughs.

Dipper isn’t laughing though. He’s kind of freaked out. He’s never had problems sleeping before, or at least, never had a sleepwalking problem, and the whole situation is…worrying.

Mabel tells him he worries too much, and plays it off like she hasn’t been startled to find him standing by her bed at three in the morning, staring and staring with glowing eyes and a lost expression.

“It is a little creepy,” She admits, over breakfast, and Grunkle Stan holds his newspaper up higher over his face so he can ignore them, or pretend he isn’t listening, it’s hard to tell, “But I’m sure it doesn’t mean anything.”

Dipper isn’t sure at all.

If anything he’s convinced that it _does_ mean something. Because this isn’t aimless wandering away from his bed, bumping into walls or taking food out of the fridge unawares. It’s the same deal every time; get up, go to Mabel’s bed, stand there staring.

That’s it.

He just stands there. Staring.

He set up a night vision camera to catch himself doing it and the footage is scary as all get out, some horror movie-worthy stuff.

He immediately thinks the worst.

He worries that this sleep walking trend is the start of something, a downhill slide into an outright break. He worries that this is the price he’ll have to pay for his powers, that soon he’ll be speaking in tongues and signaling the end of days and mindlessly murdering his sister.

He really doesn’t want to murder his sister.

“I really don’t want you to murder me either, Bro-Bro,” Mabel says through a mouthful of toast, and doesn’t look nearly concerned enough.

The pleasant feeling of victory over Bill fades to fear, to a pre-emptive guilt that grips him and won’t let go. He doesn’t know why he ever thought the demon would let him off that easy. Of course there’d be a catch. Of course it’d all go wrong. Of course he’d end up under the thumb of some cosmic being _again_ , and of course he’d only have himself to blame.

Mabel pats his head across the table, ruffling his hatless hair, and tells him, again, not to worry.

But worrying is kind of his deal.

He stays up all night so he can’t do anything weird, and succeeds.

He tries to stay up a second night and fails, drifts off sitting up in bed and when he wakes in the morning he’s on the floor covered in Mabel’s discarded stuffed animals and extra pillows.

“Morning Mr. Spooky Eyes,” She says, like this is a joke.

But Dipper doesn’t find it funny. He’s too afraid for that.

He tells her to take this clear unravelling of his psyche seriously. She tells him to lighten up.

He yells that he might be turning into an agent of darkness against his will and she flips her Skepticles on upside-down in response, points her fingers into a Batman mask.

“You are the Dip-ness,” She says in her lowest growl, “You are the night!”

He storms out in a huff and doesn’t at all mind locking himself in the gift shop that night just to keep away from her.

Apparently he can unlock doors in his sleep too.

He wakes up at three in the morning because Mabel’s nudging him with one foot, telling him to point his freaky glowing eyes somewhere else because he's keeping her up.

He can’t sleep, after that. He sits on the floor, feels kind of silly, feels really terribly helpless.

Mabel apologizes, over breakfast the next morning, for teasing him.

“It’s not that I don’t take you seriously,” She tells him, gesturing with glittering, ring-covered fingers, “It’s that you take _yourself_ too seriously. Imagine how bad it’d be if I was worrying too!”

He grumbles that she has a point. He apologizes too, for snapping at her. He’s just been a little on edge lately, and he hopes that’s not a sign of his impending switch to the dark side too.

Mabel rolls her eyes, “C’mon Broseph,” She says, “I’ve got a plan.”

These days Mabel’s plans almost always involve enchanted tiaras or beaded belts of protection. Dipper looks askance at her worktable, but she waves a hand, setting off two of her rings so they switch places, turn her hair pink, blue, green, for a moment.

“Nah, something better,” She says, and takes him back upstairs to stand by her bed, where a new addition has been hung up on the wall alongside her band posters and photo booth pictures.

It’s a dream catcher, with less beading and feathers than he’d expect from her.

“One of the ladies at the reservation’s historical society helped me make it,” She explains, and Dipper stares at it in confusion, wondering how Mabel ever found her way into a historical society in the first place, and what she thinks this is going to do for them anyway.

“It’s a dream catcher,” She clarifies, “You’ve got _dream_ demon powers. Get it?”

Dipper doesn’t get it. Or rather, he understands, he just doesn’t think it’ll work.

But he doesn’t want to shoot down her idea and make her feel bad. He thanks her for the thought and sleeps in his own bed that night, at her insistence, and hopes against hope that he doesn’t lose himself to some unimaginable world ending power.

He wakes up in the morning to the sound of Mabel laughing _._

He’s on the floor again, beside her bed, which means he was sleep walking _again_.

He’s also tangled in string and feathers though, which is new.

Mabel’s dream catcher is stuck around his fingers like the unholy mashup of a pair of handcuffs and a game of cat’s cradle.

“I told you!” She says, delighted, “I told you it would work! It caught you, ya big dream dork!”

Dipper tries to pry the string off his hands and can’t seem to manage. He has to ask Mabel to help him, which is especially embarrassing, and it doesn’t help that she giggles the whole time.

“You were just trying to get into my dreams, silly,” She says, freeing him from his feathery prison, “You must be following some kind of dream demon instinct or something.”

Dipper doesn’t think there is such a thing as dream demon instincts. But then, he believes in a lot of things that no one else does, so maybe he should expand his horizons a little.

He tells her, once his hands are free, that he’s pretty sure dream catchers are only supposed to catch _bad_ dreams.

Mabel thinks on that one a while.

“Maybe,” She says, “It just kicked you out because you weren’t invited. Maybe I could let you in.”

Dipper isn’t sure he wants any part of his sister’s crystal-encrusted, 1980s beach-babe infused dreams anyway, but the spirit of curiosity in him can’t deny wanting to know how this all works.

That night he falls asleep with his head on her shoulder, sitting on the floor while a cheesy old movie plays out its credits, and when he wakes up in the morning he’s still there, with a crick in his neck and a curtain of Mabel’s hair in his face.

He shoves her awake, demands to know what she dreamt about.

“You tell me first,” She says, and they agree to do the twin thing and speak at the same time, to see if it matches up.

They speak on the count of three, together, “Zebra-Duck marriage in the rainforest!”

Mabel fist pumps the air in success.

And even though Dipper kind of hates it when his sister is right, he’s really relieved that he’s not trying to kill her in his sleep.

.

.

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	5. The Plan

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It’s well past the dinner hour when the Pines twins file into their usual booth at Greasy’s Diner. They sit side by side, with Soos taking the full booth seat across from them, and all together breathe a sigh of exhausted relief.

Running from relentless shadow creatures is hard, even when you can fly part of the time.

Mabel already knows what she wants to order (a chocolate milkshake with extra whip cream and a plate of waffle fries with strawberry jam on the side,) so while Dipper and Soos share a menu, having a half-hearted, pointless argument about what foods constitute breakfast and which are strictly dinner, Mabel pulls out a magazine to keep herself occupied.

She browses pages of sparkling prom fashion, flipping back and forth between a picture of a girl in a slinky electric green number, and one in a pinker, poofier ball gown.

That’s going to be her, next spring, decked out and ready to dance. She sighs happily at the thought of it, already running through a list of potential prom dates in her head.

She’s got a lot of options.

When Lazy Susan comes to take their orders she calls them the Magic Twins. Dipper rolls his eyes and Mabel giggles and Soos raises his eyebrows in the gentlest ‘told you so,’ while a younger waitress, one who’s training, looks on in confusion.

She’s new here. She doesn’t know.

They’re the only ones in the diner aside from a trucker looking guy who may or may not have a tail tucked up into the back of his shirt, so their food gets sorted out quick.

Mabel asks Dipper’s opinion on the dresses she’s considering, holding up her magazine in front of his plate so he can get a good look, and he shrugs helplessly.

She’s starting to worry he’s a lost cause, fashionably speaking.

Soos votes for the green one, asks her to pass the ketchup, and she hands it over with a grin and a ‘thank you.’

The bottle just barely misses Soos’ hand, skitters to the edge of the table, between their plates, and drops off the edge. But where there should be the shattering of glass, the wet slap of ketchup across the floor, there’s nothing.

Dipper catches the bottle just before it hits the floor. Not in one hand, but in a glowing blue orb.

And everyone stares.

The trucker with the maybe-tail turns around in his seat and the young waitress who’s new and out of her league lets her mouth fall open in shock and even Lazy Susan, who knows them, who knows better, stares like she’s surprised.

Soos stares too, makes the sign of the cross, something he does a lot these days, and Dipper frowns.

“You don’t have to do that every time I use my powers, Soos,” He says, probably for the fiftieth time. He places the ketchup bottle back on the table, and as soon as his eyes stop glowing, Soos snatches it up.

“Sorry dude,” He says, “Force of habit. That’s like, some old school traditional stuff. Demonic prevention and that kinda noise.”

Dipper makes a face like he’s sucking lemons and Mabel laughs. She tells him nobody means anything by staring, and sure enough, everyone’s turned their attention back to their own business already. They’re just surprised by the light show, is all.

Even the sign of the cross thing is a little silly. She doesn’t think Soos can prevent Dipper from doing anything demonic, but it doesn’t really matter. His powers are limited; nothing too dangerous. He can’t even possess stuff- they’ve done experiments to test it. All of her stuffed animals, Waddles, and she herself have remained thoroughly unpossessed so far.

Dipper scowls at his food and mutters something about “making a scene with his stupid powers,” and Mabel’s laughter dies in her throat.

She wishes he wouldn’t say things like that. Dipper is self-conscious. Not just about this, but a little bit about everything. He bounces back from things like a champ, sure, and he’s getting better about his confidence the more he grows up, but-

Ugh. Growing up.

There’s some good to growing up, she’s found. There’s freedom and excitement in it, learning to drive and smiling without braces and picking out a dress for prom. But there’s everything she never wanted, too; harder homework, more responsibility, less fun.

There’s less magic, growing up, even when you’ve got the stuff inside you, worn on your person.

She strokes the face of the locket she picked out for today, a heavy oval pendant with little hearts etched in the metal. It’d sing lullabies if she opened it, and usually she likes to show off, but with Dipper sinking low in the booth beside her she kind of doesn’t want to.

He’s always been in a hurry to grow up.

She tells him that she thinks his powers look cool, especially when he’s saving condiments from tragic accidents.

He smiles, but only in the slight, appeasing way that he does when he wants _her_ to feel better.

Which she doesn’t.

Dipper sits up straighter when Soos poses a question about the chupacabra, something else based in unfamiliar tradition, but which Dipper is way more inclined to talk about.

And boy does he talk.

He fills the relative silence with speculation about magical creatures, talking too fast between mouthfuls of food exactly the way their mother always tells him not to.

Mabel sits, silent. They tend to switch off, her and Dipper, taking turns being the chatty one. Sometimes they say things together, accidentally or on purpose, but that always freaks Soos out a little so they avoid it when they’re with him.

She dips her fries in jam and eats the whipped cream off her milkshake using a straw like a spoon, and listens to her brother talk about legendary things he may or may not ever see.

She doesn’t understand him sometimes.

Dipper likes magic. Or, she thought he did. He likes investigating it, at least. Supernatural phenomena are totally his thing, and she always assumed he’d take to _being_ a supernatural phenomenon just as well as she did. His powers are trickier though, messier. He can never completely get the hang of them. He can’t take them off, like she can with a locket.

She wonders if demon powers ever go away, or if they can be changed, traded. She wonders if Dipper is going to be embarrassed, glowing and disappearing suddenly, intermittently, when he’s eighteen, or twenty-five, or forty.

She kind of thought they’d end up being the Magic Twins forever, even after they grew up. She already has a list of what enchanted items she’ll be passing on to her _own_ kids, whenever she has them, whenever they’re ready.

She worries, for the first time in a long time, that maybe she and Dipper aren’t on the same page.

While Dipper and Soos try to decide which would win in a fight- a were-cheetah or a were-jaguar, Mabel picks at her waffle fries and flips through her magazine, only half-listening, not really reading.

She’s got a lot on her mind and she doesn’t much like it.

“You were strangely quiet tonight,” Dipper says, later, when they’re back at the Mystery Shack and sitting on the living room floor in front of the television, the way they only really do when they’re here. There’s not a lot of furniture to go around, and they can’t both fit in Stan’s chair anymore.

Mabel makes a vague groaning noise and her brother flips from mild amusement to concern in a heartbeat; overprotective mode, engaged.

“Mabel, what’s wrong?”

She’s still got the prom magazine in her hands, rolled up and folded ten ways to Sunday in impatient creases. She rolls it that much tighter, asks him, point blank, what he wants to do when he’s grown up.

Dipper looks at her like she isn’t herself at all (and based on their history he’s got every right to be suspicious,) asks, “Where did that come from? Have you been talking to the guidance counselor at school or something?”

Mabel shakes her head. She clarifies; what does he want to do about his _powers_ when he’s grown up?

Because they’ve stayed up late talking about plans to travel the world, or maybe just the states to start, to be ace reporters and pig farmers and paranormal investigators and accessory designers. They’ve talked about taking over the Mystery Shack and everything hidden around it, if they could, if they have to, and those conversations turned more serious than Mabel ever really liked.

They’ve got teenaged plans; impermanent, unsure.

But they’ve never really talked about the magic aspect of it. It’s still new, in the grand scheme of their lives. She’d thought that, at least, was a sure thing.

“What do you mean?” Dipper still looks confused. He moves over closer, not too close. He always knows how much space she needs, “They’ll just be…there. Did you think I’d try to get rid of them or something?”

Yes. Yes that’s exactly what she thought, feared. Dipper has always wanted to be more grown up, to seem normal in front of people he thinks he has to impress. Mystical powers aren’t grown up or normal. They’re for kids and old, old wizards with long beards and pointy hats.

Funny as the thought is, she can’t actually imagine her brother as a wizard.

“Is this about the thing at the diner?” He asks, and Mabel nods sullenly, pouting. She hardly ever expects the worst, but when it comes to her brother, sometimes his paranoia rubs off.

“I would never get rid of them,” Dipper says, “I don’t even know how I would. I’m pretty sure I’m…stuck with them. Forever.”

Stuck with them?

“Sometimes they’re annoying,” Dipper admits, “But I like them. I’m kind of…proud of them. I could do without the random teleportation, but besides that I wouldn’t trade them for anything.”

Untrue, Mabel thinks, but doesn’t say. Dipper would give up floating and glowing and weird blue fire balls for the other half of Bill’s demon powers, for the answers to every mystery he could imagine. He’d give them up to save her, or anyone, probably. He’s good like that.

And she’d do the same, of course. The saving people part, not the answers to mysteries part. She likes her mysteries to stay a little mysterious. She likes her brother to stay very much alive, and she’s traded enchanted beads and bejeweled daggers and all sorts of stuff to keep him safe, to keep herself safe too.

It’s pretty heavy stuff, kind of grown up.

“Would you?” Dipper asks, quiet, careful, the way he does when things get serious and he knows even Mabel isn’t in a joking mood, “Do you? Want to give them up, I mean.”

And Mabel clutches the locket at her neck like someone might sneak up behind her and snatch it.

Never. She’s never giving up her magic.

It’s grown with her over the years, become part of her. She knows all the spirits that occupy her collection of glass and metal and minerals and she loves them like any other sentimental item, a little more than that even, since half of them can actually respond when she tells them how beautiful they are.

She’s not giving up her magic unless someone pries it from her cold, dead, super-wrinkly, elderly hands.

Dipper breathes a sigh of relief and Mabel beams at him, mood lifted.

Because she likes this plan, the growing up without giving up. She wants her prom dress and her fancy grown up travel and her very own house with a great big happy family to fill it with. She wants some grown up things.

But she also wants magic. She wants singing lockets and invisibility rings and hat pins that can destroy distant stars but won’t because she’s disabled them, and because no one wears hats anymore. She wants her brother to levitate over his chair when she hosts Thanksgiving, and she wants to float up there with him, and she wants her kids to see and learn it too, with the items she’ll pass on to them, with the methods they’re bound to find out for themselves because the Pines family has one heck of a creative streak running through it and definitely some ties to the supernatural.

She wonders aloud if demon magic gets passed on genetically, asks if Dipper will ever have little demon babies.

And she laughs while he sputters and blushes and tries to work up a full sentence and fails.

She tells him it’s alright if he doesn’t, because she’ll have enough kids for the both of them.

And hey, he can always be Grunkle Dipper.

He pushes at her shoulder, horrified and half-amused, but accidentally shifts reality in the process. Suddenly the room has turned ninety degrees to the left and her locket has popped open to start singing an old, old song. She laughs loud enough for it to ring through the house, snorts, and soon Dipper is laughing too, falling over with it.

They lay on the floor like kids, giggling, overtired, full of magic.

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	6. The Legend

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Wendy gets good at long-distance communication.

She calls her dad even though he always gets all weird and emotional on the phone. She texts Soos even though his responses are generally a mess of typos and emojis. She accepts Skype calls from Tambry and ignores friend requests from Robbie, and even sends the occasional postcard to Mr. Pines, but only ones with rude pictures on the front.

She keeps in touch, no matter where she goes, be it a part-time job at a Renaissance Faire in the mountains, or to the coast to try her hand at surfing, or into any number of cities, just to get a feel for them.

She keeps in touch with the Pines twins, especially, though that takes some getting used to.

She has to set ground rules; no portals into her bathroom, no disembodied voices from the ceiling, no calling before noon.

All three rules get broken, one way or another, but only during emergencies, or when Mabel has really, _really_ important gossip to share.

They’re good though, otherwise. Dipper and Mabel have gotten good at finding her, wherever she’s at, and they make sure to check in on the regular.

They call her separately, usually, since when they pull up portals together they tend to talk at the same time. And not in the cute twin way, where their words sync up. They talk _over_ each other, so she can’t tell the start of Dipper’s breakthrough on a mystery from the end of Mabel’s commentary on the latest in pet fashion. They start to sound a little too close to her own siblings for her liking, too loud, too close to fighting for attention.

So they call her one at a time.

Which means that she gets to hear the same stories twice, gets to dispense advice for mirrored complaints, for matching concerns.

But she’s fine with that. She doesn’t mind splitting up her time because hey, the Pines kids are cool. They’re hardly kids anymore, actually, which is a little eery. She still thinks of them like they’re twelve, and half the stuff they tell her catches her off guard, from far away and out of the picture.

While she cleans up the apartment she shares with a weird French girl she met online, she gets to hear about the things Mabel and Dipper are learning, both in high school history classes and from big, ancient books full of spells and codes.

She laughs through stories about band practices and homecoming dances while she’s supposed to be meditating on the roof (meditating is a thing she’s trying,) and offers condolences when she hears about failed experiments, failed friendships, while she cooks dinner (cooking is also a thing she’s trying.)

She gets a call at three in the morning, where Dipper is frantic and slightly red-eyed, babbling about cursed treasure chests and Mabel in danger and an ancient serpent spirit that won’t even talk to him, insists it can only answer to a “maiden pure,” and honestly she was the first girl he could even think of.

And though Wendy doesn’t think of herself as any kind of pure, or even any kind of maiden, she talks down the enormous immortal snake creature, through a shimmering portal and only half awake, reasoning with it till it lets Mabel down so she isn’t floating twelve feet off the ground, unconscious.

She gets a less panicked call at noon on a Sunday, where Mabel is giggling and trying to keep quiet, because her brother is asleep in the car beside her and if she’s too loud he’ll wake up and Wendy won’t get to see that he really _does_ sleep sometimes, and also that Mabel has covered him in little purple whale stickers.

She gets a late night call from someone who _definitely_ isn’t either of the Pines twins, and waits until a collection of preteen voices start muttering about how the magic piece of junk they stole doesn’t even work before she answers the call. When she steps into view of the portal with post-shower wet hair flipped in front of her face, making the most unearthly screeching noises she can manage and howling “Return unto thee, return unto thee!” while clawing at the air, the kids scream and drop Mabel’s favorite mystic orb in the dirt.

She gives the Pines household a call later, the old fashioned telephone way, asks to speak to Mabel, or Dipper, or both of them. She tells them they should keep a better eye on their magical items, and also that she might have just become the next great urban legend.

Dipper opens portals in her bedroom, with permission; small, glowing things that feel a lot like talking on webcam, except after twenty or so minutes she can always see him start to struggle, like whatever weird demon magic he’s using to keep it open is an effort.

Mabel calls her on a haunted old phone that frankly creeps her out, with the way one end of it just appears on the table and rings until she picks up, but she has to admit, the call quality is better than anything she gets on her cell.

She tells them what she’s up to, each in turn, and that isn’t as fun. Her own stories feel way less interesting by comparison, but each of them listen intently, full of questions that sometimes overlap, but are usually unique.

Dipper wants to know if there’s paranormal stuff in Portland, in Seattle, out in the ocean when she spends a week on a boat getting acquainted with the Pacific (and yes of course there is, and yes of course she’ll try to take pictures.) He wants to hear about the time she rescued a dog on the street outside her apartment, and the time she got to be an extra in that horror movie that hasn’t come out yet, and about the temp job she picked up in a library full of weird, old shit.

He wants to know if she’s dating anyone, only because he’s curious, but he doesn’t want to come off as creepy or weird or nosey so he makes Mabel ask for him.

Or, that’s what Mabel tells her anyway.

So Mabel wants to know if she’s dating anyone (yeah, a few people here and there,) but mostly if she’s made cool new friends (absolutely, everywhere.) She wants to hear about the parties she goes to, the music festival she spent a weekend at, the people she meets when she takes the bus because bus people are _always_ super interesting.

Wendy shrugs off a whole lot, asks them both to talk more about themselves. They’ve always got something wild going on.

She gets to hear about the 18th century ghost that Mabel had a crush on, and the werewolf she kissed at a party, and the nixie she was dating for a while, but broke up with on good terms.

She gets to hear about the vampire that Dipper dated briefly, kind of unintentionally. Because as it turns out, in spite of his demon powers and general quick wit, Dipper is highly susceptible to both peer pressure and mild forms of mind control.

She talks to Mabel about hair colors, which crayon bright dyes will work best and which will wash out. Mabel shows off all her new accessories, ones that sparkle and ones that grow leaves and vines, and asks if Wendy thinks the rule about taking one thing off before you leave the house really applies. Wendy says no, but to be careful with the ones that shoot fire.

She talks to Dipper about the pros and cons of bending reality with your own hands. Dipper asks if she thinks it’s okay that he drops out of an advanced placement class even though he can technically handle the work, because it’s stressing him out bigtime. Wendy says yes, and that if anybody gives him trouble about it she’ll beat them up.

She realizes that the Pines twins can probably take care of themselves, especially now, but the offer still stands. She’d kick ass for either of them any day.

When she comes back to Gravity Falls for two weeks in the summer, to see everyone face to face after so many months of blurry webcams and confusing text messages and mystic pools opening up in her kitchen sink, most of the people she talks to look the same.

Her dad is pretending his hairline isn’t receding.

Tambry’s got a lip piercing she already regrets.

Dipper Pines is _as tall as her_ , holy hell, and Mabel is a full inch and a half taller.

They take her to the Mystery Shack, each with an arm looped around hers on either side, and they talk more in sync than she’s heard from them before, except for the places where Mabel elaborates with explosion noises and Dipper stutters to a stop trying to keep up.

They show her the art piece Mabel painted based on her story about the teenaged thieves, all dripping hair and curving claws like some kind of vengeful spirit, and the t-shirts that Stan has already printed using the image.

They’re calling her “The Wailing Woman,” and the tourists love her.

Turns out she does make for a pretty great urban legend.

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	7. The Chase

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Dipper doesn’t think he’ll ever get used to the feeling of abject terror.

Which is probably a good thing. Terror seems like one of those feelings no one is supposed to get used to. Fear is the body’s signal to go, to fight, to survive, and he thinks if he ever got complacent, he’d be toast.

Even without becoming complacent, he still might be toast. Because at this very moment he and Mabel are deep in a series of caves on the outskirts of town, running from a great big burrowing beast that he doesn’t remember ever seeing mentioned in any of the journals.

It could be a new one. It could be an actual discovery, not just a sighting, and that thought has him almost as excited as he is scared half to death.

He’s thinking of calling it the mudslasher, or the cavecarver, or maybe just the really, really big, vicious mole.

He’s thinking too much, probably, when he should just be running. Mabel’s hand is in his, as it has been since they crashed down into this section of the caves and came face to face with one of the biggest sets of fangs either of them had ever seen, and he thinks if he concentrates _just_ hard enough, he might be able to teleport them out of here.

He tells her so, pulling her a little to the right when she nearly trips over a root, too preoccupied with one of the pendants around her neck to watch where she’s going.

“Sounds good, broses,” She says, clicking something into place on the face of the pendant, “Zap us on over to the promise land and I’ll shoot ol’ dirtdevil back down his hidey hole!”

Right. Right. Good plan. Sounds good. He’s on escape, she’s on attack.

Dipper thinks quick, always, which is a blessing and a curse. His ideas only work half the time, so even though he can score a glorious victory off a one in a million chance, he can also fail miserably and get himself into worse trouble than he ever imagined. He's hoping today is one of those glorious victory days.

Mabel thinks quick too, just differently, and she seems to be able to pull a surprise victory out of any failure. Mabel’s the one with the grappling hook, swinging in to meet him halfway, to save the day. She’s also the one with all the mystical smoke amulets and protective force-fields locked up in crystal hair clips, and he has to remember that. Mabel always comes out of things okay. She rarely ever has to head home with so much as a scratch.

That doesn’t stop him from worrying about her.

But they’re together right now so it’s okay. They’ve got a two-tiered plan, so it’s okay.

He tries to employ the escape half of the plan, to channel the strange, tingling magic that runs through him into a conscious movement and it works-

Kind of.

He does teleport them, just not as far as he meant to, not quite in the right direction. He hasn’t mastered the skill yet, not by a longshot, and no matter how much he practices in the relative safety of the Mystery Shack, he can’t seem to get it down. Anxiety in the face of a potentially gruesome demise doesn’t help matters any.

They land gracefully enough, on the ground at least, and still far enough ahead of the monster chasing after them, but they lose grip on each other somewhere along the way.

They’re separated, only by a few feet, but that’s still too much. The giant mole creature favors the left side of the passage, is slightly closer to Mabel, _way_ too close for Dipper’s liking.

“Nice try on the teleport,” Mabel calls over to him, entirely sincere and slightly impressed. She turns around so she’s running backwards, haphazard, going to hit the back wall of the cave soon and he’s not sure if she’s just ignoring that fact or if she’s really so focused on setting loose whatever’s in her pendant that she hasn’t noticed.

He yells to her, a warning, but she just shouts over him, capturing the mole’s attention and skipping back further, further, as the creature churns up dirt in its efforts to reach her.

She’s going to end up cornered. She isn’t thinking. Dipper thinks she isn’t, at least. She does that sometimes, when she gets caught up, leaps without looking. He calls across to ask her what the heck she’s doing but she just yells over him again, making obnoxious, gibberish noises.

“I haaaaaaaave a plan,” She calls to him, drawing a few vowels out.

Dipper tries to think of his own plan, as a backup, just in case. His heart is in his throat as he watches a monster barrel toward his sister, watches her slip the pendant from around her neck and hold it high, a glowing beacon set to explode or fly away or something else he can’t guess at.

The space between Mabel and the monster seems too small, the power of the pendant too unpredictable.

His powers are unpredictable too, but-

But he panics.

He shouts up at the monster, probably the worst battle cry in history. He teleports to Mabel’s side in a flash of altered time and space, grabbing her by the arm even as she protests. He steps in front of her, making himself into a shield, and directs every ounce of energy in him to bending reality, just for once, _please_ at least this once, the way he wants.

He sends the monster back, back, down and away through a suddenly, briefly, colorless world. He tips it on its side and drops it down one of its many self-made tunells, as far away as he can imagine in the moment.

It’s a lot to move around, a lot of energy to use, and once the thing is out of sight and his vision brightens from monochrome, Dipper’s relieved sigh becomes something closer to a whine of exhaustion.

Bad move, genius. Stopped the monster? Yes. Tired himself out? Also yes. But at least Mabel is safe and sound and can probably just levitate them out of the cave now that his legs don’t want to work. At least they’re both okay-

“Dipper!” Mabel shouts, and she doesn’t sound distressed or hurt or like she’s about to be carried off by a giant monster. She just sounds mad.

He turns to look at her, feeling ever so slightly woozy, and winces when she levels him with _such_ a look. The pendant in her hand lets out a whisper-scream that fades into silence in light of the decreased danger, its power flickering out to nothing.

“I had a plan, Dipper!” Mabel cries, gesturing down the path that the beast trying to eat her just took against its will, “I totally had that!”

And Dipper isn’t sure what to say. He was only trying to help. He was just scared. He was thinking fast and nervous and he didn’t mean to get in her way.

“You always do this,” Mabel says, lowering her voice a little. She sounds angry, hurt, and Dipper hates to be the cause, “You’re always jumping in front of me and moving me out of the way and trying to _protect_ me. I can take care of myself!”

And he knows that! He knows that. He doesn’t mean to get shrill, to get loud with her. He’s defensive of his defensive action, had thought she was in danger, thought she might be gone if he hesitated for even a moment.

Mabel widens her eyes in a way he doesn’t like, her expression more exasperated and teenaged than he’d ever expect to see from her, a look that’s more at home on his own face. She says, “Do you forget I’ve got like, a bajillion magic things on me at all times? I. Can. Take. Care. Of. Myself.”

Repeating it doesn’t make it any more of less true, and it doesn’t change Dipper’s feelings on the matter. He’s always been like this. He’s always looked out for Mabel, looked after her. It’s a mutual thing, what with the body shielding and helping hands and grappling hook rescues.

“You make me feel like a baby,” Mabel mutters, and she isn’t looking at him, is staring out far away, watching for anything that might sneak up and try to eat them, “Which is dumb. I’m the older one anyway, and you don’t have to be all…overprotective brother about me. It’s embarrassing.”

Dipper fumbles his words.

He’s not…he wasn’t…he didn’t _mean_ …

But he can’t deny there’s some truth to her accusation.

He _is_ sort of being an overprotective brother. It’s what he thought he was supposed to do. From the time he could stand up on his own he’s had people telling him to look after his sister; when she was the one trying to eat fake fruit, when she wanted to climb over the railing on the stairs to parachute down, when she decided to pet the nice doggy behind the barbed wire fence at the junkyard.

And again, in snarkier tones, with smugger smiles; when people would look at Mabel’s tiny play-makeup smeared face and warn that she’d be a wild one when she grew up, when people would see her chatting up boys on the playground and laugh that she was going to get herself in trouble, when people would look her over from top to bottom and smirk and say that the boys would be after her in no time and ew, _ew_ , why do peple say things like that? Why would anyone say that about a little girl, say that _to_ a little boy? That’s got to be damaging in like fifteen different ways and nauseating in twelve others and he's going to have to talk to her about it in depth some time because he's _sure_ she's got something to say about it- but he’s getting off topic.

He never meant to be overprotective. And he doesn’t think of Mabel as someone that needs to be protected, not like that. He doesn’t care if she causes trouble or not, and doesn’t mind who she dates as long as they don’t break her heart, and okay, yeah, maybe he is a little overprotective. But it’s not because they’re siblings, not because he’s the brother and he’s _supposed_ to look out for her because that’s a great big bunch of crap.

Looking out for Mabel isn’t his duty, it’s just what he does. He does it because Mabel is his best friend, still and always, and the thought of her getting hurt, the thought of losing her- it’s unacceptable.

It’s just instinctive, he tells her, apologetic. He doesn’t mean anything by it.

Mabel’s expression softens. She slips her cold, silent pendant back on. She twists two sets of rings around counterclockwise on her fingers, adjusting them, preparing. There’s a distant rumbling from down a far off tunnel, presumably the one Dipper sent their giant mole friend into.

“I know,” She sighs, and smiles sympathetically when Dipper has to take a step back to lean against a conveniently placed rock formation to keep from falling over.

Mabel gets it, on some level. She does. Because she has essentially the same instinct, the one that compels her to try to _help_ with everything, that keeps her underfoot and occasionally meddling. It’s what gets her into Dipper’s business, makes her keep a stickered chart of his social progress in school and leave torn out pages from teen magazines full of suggestions for dealing with stress out on his bed.

She wants to help him and he wants to look after her. She gets it.

“But could you at least not yell stuff at monsters and weird criminals like ‘ _get away from my sister?’,_ ” She asks as the two rings she just rotated begin to glow and chime, softly, “It’s kind of,” She shrugs, waves a hand like she isn’t sure of the word, the sentiment, “Patronizing.”

Dipper blushes. Did he yell that at the monster? He didn’t mean to yell that at the monster. It probably didn’t understand him anyway.

He’s going to have to…work on that.

Mabel nods as the rumbling becomes louder, closer. Her rings are chiming more frequently now, high pitched and perfectly timed like tiny fire alarms, “And maybe,” She says, smile turning just a little bashful, “I can work on communication. So you know that I’ve got a plan and not a death wish.”

Dipper laughs, because the concept of Mabel with a death wish is so completely foreign, he can’t even process it. He takes a seat on the ground since he figures she and her magic rings have got the approaching monster covered- he’s got faith that she does, at least.

He wonders if maybe they try just a _little_ harder, they might finally be able to break into telepathy instead of just the weird vague twin senses they were maybe born with, but could just as easily be the sort of unspoken knowing that comes from years of togetherness.

It’s probably a combination of the two, maybe-magic and definitely-intuition.

And on second thought he probably doesn’t want Mabel to have complete access to his mind anyway. So maybe twin senses are good enough.

He asks her what the plan is, laughs again, a little more tensely, when she says, “Wing it!”

She grins at him, twisting one of the chiming rings off her fingers, and the moment it’s no longer touching her skin it goes quiet. It keeps glowing though, slightly brighter when the ground beneath them shakes, and Mabel clarifies, “No literally, wing it at him.”

Dipper doesn’t feel much better about the plan. He keeps that to himself though, simply buckling down, preparing to run or intervene (hopefully without ticking his sister off,) while Mabel takes on a fighting stance.

There’s one last rumble before the monster breaches the surface, erupting out of the ground in a shower of dirt and dust, fangs already bared.

Mabel whispers something to her ring, probably not a spell but rather a sweet reassurance to an inanimate object, and a moment later the glowing circle is sailing toward the head of the beast.

Dipper watches it fly, shields his eyes as the small light emanating from the ring flashes ten times as bright, a burst of hot white that leaves glowing imprints on the insides of his eyelids. The ring makes a sound like a gong as it meets its mark, clocking the giant mole right in the middle of the head.

Mabel shrieks, “Y _eeeeeeeeeer_ out!” and does a little victory dance, even before the monster falls flat on its furry face, out cold.

And that’s that.

Dipper insists on going with Mabel to retrieve her ring, even though it’s only a few yards away and the mole is unconscious, and even though he still feels a little faint from messing with reality. He’s seriously got to get a handle on that, maybe start carrying protein bars or…dream power restoration…bars…or something.

Mabel laughs at his wobbliness, says, “You’re like a baby dream deer,” and laughs even harder when he scowls. She helps him walk up to the felled monster (more of a big, misunderstood baby, she says,) and away once she’s got the ring back on her finger. The second one has stopped chiming and glowing too, and when Dipper asks what it was supposed to do, she shakes her head.

“That one was back up,” She says, and taps her head with her free hand as if to say, _see, I was thinking._

Dipper thinks maybe Mabel is better at twin senses than he is. He tries thinking, extra hard, that she’s really impressive and obviously capable of handling herself.

“Y’know though,” She says, helping him along on the quickest path out of the cave system without any magic at all, “Even though I’m great with plans and cool magic stuff, I’m glad I’ve always got a partner with me, just in case,” She beams at him, gives him a half-hug that lifts him off the ground slightly, “Thanks _partner_.”

And Dipper isn’t sure if she read his mind or guessed at what he was feeling or if she was just continuing her own thought. He thinks maybe it’s better that he doesn’t know.

He tells her, blinking in the fading daylight that they emerge into, that he’s glad to have a partner too.

Though she really doesn’t have to help him walk this much.

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	8. The Assignment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're beginning to wonder if the point of these one-shots is to end each one with the Pines twins collapsing on each other in a happy pile of magic kids and/or laughing- yes.

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Mabel watches her brother step over a beam in the attic ceiling and keep on walking, upside down and talking a stream of excited chatter, and grins to herself.

His hat is on the floor, having fallen prey to the laws of physics before he got himself righted up there, and his hair is all stuck up in a wild, curling mess, like it doesn’t know how to stay attached to the rest of him. Though honestly it tends to do that any time he takes his hat off, and Mabel suspects that its current state has nothing to do with gravity. He looks perfectly normal otherwise, in spite of being on the ceiling.

“You should put on your levitation amulet and come up Mabel, seriously,” He tells her, gesturing from her place on the floor up to his own momentarily paused position near the window, “It’s a whole new perspective.”

But Mabel stays where she is, stretched out on her stomach with a notebook open, the mostly-blank page in front of her covered in more doodles than words. She reminds Dipper that it isn’t as easy for her to be upside down, since the blood still rushes to her head when she tries to float that way.

Dipper stares down at her and shrugs, says, “It doesn’t even feel like being upside down to me.”

Mostly because it’s not. Not really. Dipper is actually standing upright, on one plane, just maneuvering the rest of the room around him to walk up the walls and across the ceiling like the world’s most sweaty and awkward demon spider. If anything, Mabel might be the one upside down right now, just without realizing it.

Honestly it makes her head hurt to think about, so she tries to ignore just how much her brother is toying with the reality of their shared space. She’s _supposed_ to be focusing on school right now anyway, which is a horrifying and brain-crushing concept all on its own.

Schoolwork? In the summer? Eaugh. Blargh. Other barf noises.

When she agreed to take a harder English class next year she didn’t realize it would mean summer assignments. She wants to go find her teacher from this past year, the one who swindled her into more work by way of flattery (since her creative writing assignments really _were_ incredible and yes she _is_ super creative and a fantastic storyteller, thank you for noticing!) and point an accusing finger, explain that this was one heck of a dirty trick.

Surprise summer book reports are the worst kind of surprise.

Of course Dipper already finished all the summer work for his smartypants classes, reading the Old Testament and doing a take home quiz and writing about German mysticism in World War II all in their first week off, and ripped through a complete mystery book series afterwards just for fun. Dipper’s a scholar.

Mabel is an artist. A visionary. She’s looking forward to a schedule of drawing and painting and even computer graphics. She’s _especially_ looking forward to her creative crafts class since; A. crafts are great, B. she’s going to _own_ that class, and C. Dipper is being forced to take an art class too and that was the only one with openings and since there are only two crafts classes offered at their school there’s a fifty/fifty chance they’ll be in the same class.

She mentally bumps it up to a ninety percent chance, since twin powers, and also she’s willing the universe with every fiber of her wishing power to put her brother in a class where she can cover him in glitter under the watch of an authority figure and get away with it.

“Did you decide what book to do your report on?” Dipper asks, walking down the far wall and poking at a loose nail he finds there.

Mabel makes a vague groaning sound, pulls a face because somehow it’s way more disorienting to see him standing up sideways rather than just upside down.

No, she has no idea what book to choose. She’s got a list of four short novels, and though she’s read over the assignment ten or twelve times already she honestly hasn’t absorbed any of the information. All the book summaries look the same, boring. They’re a bunch of old books by dead guys- a lot of misery and desperation and shaking their fists at the sky. _Yawn_.

“They’re supposed to have similar themes,” Dipper told her when she first got the assignment sheet, “So the whole class can write about kind of the same thing. It’s probably the theme for the year. That’s how most of these classes work.”

And Mabel stared extra hard at the sheet, and thought extra hard about the possibility of dropping the class entirely, because the idea of spending a whole year talking about the things boring old guys thought were important about ten billion years ago makes something inside her shrivel.

She wishes she could write about real things instead of dusty old books; things like summer skies and tree sap stains on her shoes and magic. She wishes she could write about her brother walking on the ceiling like it’s just the natural way to do things, that she could hand that kind of assignment in to a teacher and they wouldn’t look at her like she was a five headed dragon.

She wishes she was a five headed dragon. But also a princess. A princess dragon.

She tells Dipper so and he laughs, asks, “Does that mean you’d have to kidnap yourself?”

For ransom, she says, and halfway down the stairs, Grunkle Stan (who swears he never, ever listens in on them or checks up on them or really gives a hoot about what they’re doing at all,) calls, “That’s the way to do it!”

Mabel laughs while Dipper trips over his feet, just as graceless moving through an unknown dream dimension as he is when he’s down here on the ground with the rest of them. He keeps trying little jumps and sidesteps, testing his staying power on the ceiling.

Mabel looks away from him, back down at her notebook, the approved reading list tucked inside and already defaced with various sick-looking caricatures of her own face, and wishes she could just stay here forever.

She likes it here, she always has. She can be herself anywhere, of course, but in Gravity Falls she feels _most_ herself. Dipper is more himself here too, happier, more excited about things. He talks to her more than he does back at home, where he gets tense and quiet and spends a lot of time in books or video games while she’s catching up with friends.

He’s got his nose in a book a lot here too, sure, but he always follows up reading with a suggestion to go stomping around in the woods to look for something really, really cool. He almost always invites Mabel along, and sometimes _she_ gets to drag _him_ places, and she loves that.

She loves it here.

But she refuses to get gloomy about eventually going home. Since she loves home too, just in a lot of different ways. She loves their house and their school and her friends and their parents and all of that. She loves that, lately, when she leans into Dipper’s room and asks if he wants to come out and do something with her, he sometimes says yes. Not when ‘something’ means going to the mall or scoping out total babes wherever they happen to be, but other times, yes.

So no, she can’t be upset about eventually going home. Not when things there are really pretty great.

She just wishes she could take more of here home with her, beyond the magic jewels and reality-bending.

Back overhead, Dipper slips a little, stumbles, and for a moment Mabel is worried he’ll fall. She rolls over and spreads her arms wide, as if to catch him, but his feet never quite leave the ceiling and she ends up staring right up at him, pretending that she simply wanted to take a break from laying on her stomach.

“Whoops,” He says, sheepish, and once he’s admitted to his mistake she owns up to hers, blowing a raspberry at him and offering a scolding for scaring her.

“You probably shouldn’t try to catch me from there anyway,” He says, “You might, I don’t know, break your arms or something.”

Mabel sizes him up, knowing she can lift him easily. Catching though…he might have a point. Ideally she’d like to not have to catch her brother if he falls from their vaulted ceiling. Ideally she’d like him not to fall at all.

He seems to have a handle on it though, keeping his balance as he sits down, gets comfortable.

“Are you sure you want to take this class?” Dipper asks, jerking his head in the direction of her abandoned notebook, the most-hated reading list.

And Mabel wants to get defensive, because she can totally do the work and it’ll look really impressive and her parents will be proud if she does.

But that’s not what Dipper’s asking. He wants to know what she _wants_ , and that’s a different story.

What she wants to do is drop the class and never look at a dusty old book ever again, unless it’s got magic spells in it. She wants to take an independent study in jewelry making since they don’t have that class at school, though she isn’t sure if anyone will approve her request for a soldering iron. She wants to make her parents proud in her own way, rather than letting teachers try to push her on the same path as Dipper.

She tells him that she wants to let Waddles eat her homework, except that’d be cruel and unusual punishment for such a good pig. She makes a mental note to make him a meal that’s nicer than boring homework, like a mixed salad or a pie.

“If you hate it this much now you’re not going to like it any better for a whole year. Especially when they start talking about symbolism,” Dipper warns, and Mabel knows that he’s right.

There are things you don’t like that you have to soldier through, and then there are things that are pointless to torture yourself with.

She thinks she’ll call home tomorrow morning and talk it over with her parents. They won’t mind, probably. They won’t mind anything, she thinks, as long as she doesn’t come home with any more creepy magical items (and oh boy are they going to be disappointed if they check her luggage at the end of the summer.) At this point she’s practically the golden child, if only due to the fact that she doesn’t accidentally disappear when she sneezes.

Which, by the way, Dipper hardly ever does any more. He’s getting better at the dream power thing every day, little by little. He hasn’t unintentionally rotated a room in weeks! She’s proud of him, even if the rest of the family is more freaked out than anything. She’s been telling him so, when he looks put out by his misbehaving powers, and she thinks maybe her cheerleading has helped.

He’s doing fine now, anyway, up on the ceiling. He’s been up there for a while, in fact. Since after dinner, actually, and-

Can he not get down?

She asks, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

Dipper clears his throat, says, “Of course I can get down. Maybe.”

So he can’t get down. And he didn’t say anything because…?

“I didn’t want to bother you while you were working,” He says, which is practically a joke since they both knew there was no way she was actually going to do more than make faces at her notebook and write grumpy, grouchy words in the margins. The irony of her brother worrying about disrupting _her_ work doesn’t escape her either, and she wonders vaguely if being up on the ceiling for so long is messing with his brain.

At least there’s no risk of the blood rushing to his head.

Mabel gets up from the floor and brushes herself off, tells her brother to meet her at the low part of the ceiling. When she stands on her toes there and he reaches out far, farther, she can grab onto his hands and try to pull him down.

He doesn’t budge.

She tells him to let go of whatever he’s holding onto over there and though he claims he’s not doing anything, she doesn’t totally believe him. Dipper doesn’t give up control of anything too easily. He probably doesn’t realize how hard he’s trying to fix it himself. He probably doesn’t want to fall on her, either.

She’s thinking that maybe she should go grab a few rune stones to compel him down, or flat out summon him and see how that goes, when he tells her to wait.

“Can I try something?” He asks, and Mabel isn’t about to say no. She loves trying things, loves when her brother has big, brilliant ideas, even when they don’t work.

“It’s not really a big idea,” He tells her, and holds onto her hands a little tighter. His eyes glow, just for a moment, and suddenly Mabel is acutely aware of how upside down she is.

Though she sees what Dipper means now- it doesn’t _feel_ upside down, really.

She’s in his bubble, the otherworldly space that he occasionally occupies, and she grins ear to ear at being able to share this too.

“Ah,” He says, still holding her, less by the hands and more by the arms, loosely, as if guiding her, “That was…definitely what I meant to do.”

And Mabel laughs and doesn’t care at all, because her abandoned homework is all the way down there and she’s all the way up here, hanging out on the ceiling with her brother.

“Well, okay, sort of what I meant to do. Just backwards,” Dipper admits, and very carefully lets go of her arms.

She doesn’t drop to the floor like he seems to fear she will, but stays standing right beside him. She sits down so he’ll do the same, and thinks that eventually they’ll figure out a way to get back to the floor. That, or they’ll just have to walk sideways as close to the ground as possible forever.

Which isn’t the worst thing, out of all the weird reality bending things to happen.

She suggests they could have a ceiling sleepover, and Dipper only rolls his eyes a little.

“We can hang out up here for a while at least,” He says, then glances toward the floor, looking slightly concerned, “And hope we figure out how to get down before I get tired. If I fall asleep then we really might fall.”

Mabel isn’t too concerned. She says they should have thought to bring their golf clubs up here, since playing attic golf upside down is probably twice as fun as the regular way, but Dipper thinks she’d just win twice as easily.

That doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to try it, though.

They make a game of trying to reach the old golf clubs in the corner upside down instead, which starts out fun and quickly turns frustrating, but tips back to fun again when Mabel gets a mouthful of hair trying to pull off a particularly impressive leap and grab maneuver and sputters for a minute or so. Dipper’s laughter is loud, sharp where his voice cracks, and when he tries to help Mabel free herself from her hair prison he accidentally misplaces the strands from his altered reality, leaving them to gravity’s pull.

He laughs even harder at Mabel’s standing-straight-up hair, and she laughs at his dorky laugh, and Grunkle Stan yells up the stairs for them to quit being weird before they attract federal agents or paranormal investigators or raccoons.

They don’t get down from the ceiling until Dipper is tired and his powers start to flicker, but they drift rather than fall, finding their way to the floor like leaves on a breeze.

Mabel tells him he should try that at school some time, the walking on the ceiling thing, once he learns how to get back down faster.

Dipper says, “If you ever see me on a ceiling at school, assume I’m about to die. Either because someone’s trying to kill me, or out of embarrassment.”

Mabel shushes him, pats him on the head, prompting him to snatch his hat back up from off the floor. She tells him he might _have_ to go up on the ceiling at school, if he wants to try and stop _her_ from doing it first. She’s going to have a free period, maybe, if she drops the gross English class and no one approves her jewelry making idea. Going for ceiling walks sound a lot more fun than study hall.

“Don’t you dare,” Dipper warns, without any real threat to his voice.

She won’t. Probably.

She watches Dipper spread out on the floor, taking up her spot from earlier, exhausted. She asks, looking down at him, if he wants anything. She might go make summertime hot chocolate, she hints, if she can find anything in Grunkle Stan’s pantry other than icky old man food.

Dipper resists for half a moment, cracks easily, saying, “Yeah. That’d be nice.”

Mabel leaves her brother on the floor, staring up at the ceiling they just traversed, too worn out to even remind her not to put any sparkles or fruit syrup or surprise mug-stickers in his drink.

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	9. A Brief Interruption

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One story in two parts, for a change. And a reminder that the timeline for these pieces bounces around a bit.

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When Mabel asks Wendy if she wants to join in on a ‘Girls Night’ thing she’s trying out, Wendy says sure.

She tells Mabel that she can’t buy her drinks or anything, since every place in town has finally caught on to her fake ID, but Mabel just laughs.

“Not that kind of Girls Night,” She says, though her momentarily devious expression suggests that she’s filing the idea of Wendy’s fake ID away in some corner of her mind, “I’m just hanging out with some friends at the Shack. I figured we could test out some magic junk!”

And Wendy is cool with Mabel’s friends and thinks magic junk can be pretty sweet, so yeah, she’s on board, even if she’s kind of on the fence about being lumped in with ‘the girls’ in this context.

She laughs while Mabel kicks Dipper out of the house for the evening and banishes Stan to his room with a few cans of brown meat and his most comfortable slippers so he won’t bug anyone, impressed, but not surprised, by how much power she wields in their home. She watches Mabel’s friends burst through the front door with only slightly less enthusiasm than she remembers them having at age twelve and greets them each with a casual wave.

There’s a round of hugs, which Wendy stays out of, but there’s also soda and snacks, which she helps herself to without hesitation.

She hunkers down on the floor of the attic with Mabel who’s twice as sparkling as ever in her most protective jewelry, with Candy who has recently given herself an impromptu haircut that teeters on the borderline between trendy and disastrous, with Grenda who has gotten _really_ good at putting on makeup, like, holy crow.

She feels a little funny, hanging out with a bunch of younger teens, but after all the time she’s spent with the Pines twins already, a few more hours of kid-style hijinks probably won’t matter.

Wendy rolls up her sleeves when Mabel announces she’s called them here today to test out her most recent magical find, laughs at the excited ooing and ahhing that Candy and Grenda provide, as if on cue. Mabel usually saves the serious magical stuff for herself, to share with Dipper when she’s got something dangerous and needs a little help, so this is an interesting change of pace.

Wendy’s only seen a few items up close and personal, some of which she really wishes she had never gotten acquainted with.

A cursed tie pin? Not as funny as it sounds. Not when it goes for your throat, anyway.

Today’s item is safe, Mabel assures them, “It’s just a mirror,” She says with a shrug. She pulls it out of the front pocket of her sweater, shows them the carved back of it. It is just a mirror; a hand mirror, probably antique.

Wendy doesn’t mention any of the horror movies she’s seen that revolve around mirrors. She tries not to think about any of the superstitions she’s heard about them. She figures Mabel knows what she’s talking about.

“A magic mirror?” Grenda asks, hopeful.

Of course a magic mirror. As if Mabel Pines would collect anything less. Unless it was simply supremely bedazzled, in which case, heck yes she’d take that mirror and _make_ it magic.

“It shows the future,” Mabel says in a whisper, and pauses long enough for her friends to gasp, for Wendy to raise an eyebrow in curiosity, “Kind of.”

And Wendy thinks of cootie-catchers, of Tambry’s horrified little kid scream when a piece of folded paper told her she’d have to marry an ugly old troll. Wendy remembers laughing then because she was promised a cute husband, smiles at the thought now because she’s pretty sure the threat of marrying a troll is very real.

She’s not so sure she wants any kind of husband, frankly. But if Mabel and her friends want to go looking into the future for theirs, she won’t stop them.

“I must know what comes next!” Candy cries, but freezes when Mabel puts up a hand, a warning.

“It’s not exact,” She says, “It shows a whole bunch of futures. Possible ones,” She pitches her voice down a little, trying for spooky and just barely managing to overcome her usual cheeriness, “Things that could be, but could also never be. You can’t trust it.”

Wendy smirks because for as much as Mabel is playing, she’s kind of serious too. She sounds amusingly like her brother when she gets all foreboding like this.

Candy is still itching to get a hold of the thing though, despite the warning, and clearly Mabel isn’t too concerned since she hands it over without another word.

They cluster around, look over Candy’s shoulders as she holds the mirror up and stares at her reflection. It only takes a moment for the image to ripple and change, reflecting instead someone who could be an older sister, a mother. The picture shifts in waves, flickering like there’s some interference. They see Candy in a lab coat and sleeker, frameless glasses, then with short, spiked up hair and heavy eyeliner, then glossed and fluffed and plumped about the lips like a beauty queen.

Grenda and Mabel coo over each future in turn, sighing that she looks _so_ cool in each one.

When the reflection flickers back to match her own Candy is pouting, disappointed. She hands the mirror off to Grenda, saying, “But I was not a cyborg in _any_ of those futures!”

They all agree that this is regrettable, but Mabel reminds her that the mirror is iffy. Not reliable.

“My turn!” Grenda insists, and they all scoot over, crowd around again.

They keep going around the circle, sleepover style, with Mabel and her friends giggling over images of Grenda as a librarian, of Mabel carrying three cats in one hooded sweatshirt. They poke and prod and tease each other like they’re playing a magical game of M.A.S.H, and when it should be Wendy’s turn they all frown as she shrugs her disinterest.

She doesn’t want to know the future, even if it’s a fake one. She definitely doesn’t want to mess with a mirror, since they’re kind of freaky even without being magic, and frankly her luck with mystical objects is probably not the best.

“Name one time a magic object backfired,” Mabel argues, but as soon as Wendy opens her mouth she adds, “And it wasn’t my fault. Or Dipper’s.”

Wendy thinks maybe more of her magic issues have been with monsters, actually, and a few portals here and there, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful. She thinks the mirror is probably harmless, but still not something she wants to gaze into right now.

She is- and she holds the thought like a secret to take to her grave- a little afraid to look into the mirror and see a face too much like her mother’s looking back at her. She’s even more afraid to see something that isn’t familiar at all.

She shrugs it off, saying that the future just isn’t her deal, leaves it at that.

“I understand,” Mabel sighs, only a little put out. She hushes Grenda’s playful chant of “peer pressure,” and puts the mirror aside.

Which should be the end of it.

Except apparently magic mirrors don’t like to be ignored.

One second they’re all getting up and talking about ordering a pizza, the next there’s a flash of light and a burst of smoke and a sound like glass breaking.

Mabel’s assorted magic charms start pinging and chiming in unison, making a racket that would likely draw Stan upstairs if he hadn’t already fallen asleep face first in a magazine centerfold of a fully clothed woman. 

As the smoke clears and Mabel’s jewelry keeps on chirping and alerting her to danger, Wendy blinks her vision back to normal. There are more figures in the room then there should be, all just slightly too familiar, and dread is already sinking quick in her stomach. She looks to Mabel on her right, sees her take on a fighting stance, and finally everything comes into focus.

There are four other Wendys on the opposite side of the attic, each slightly different from the others, all completely different from her, and all of them look ready to throw down.

“Wow,” Grenda says, too loud and too pleasantly surprised for the situation, “That really _is_ a magic mirror.”

“I can fix this!” Mabel shouts, “Hold on!”

But there is no holding on. One of the Wendys shows her teeth. Another pulls a hatchet out of her belt.

Wendy, the one and only Wendy, sighs.

She’s getting really tired of fighting herself.

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When Dipper asked Soos earlier in the day if he could tag along on the yearly trip to the hardware store in town, Soos said sure.

Actually, he said it’d be nice to have company for once since Mr. Pines usually sends him on his own, armed with the measly budget that goes toward new equipment each season.

It’s not a problem when all he has to pick up are a few nails that aren’t completely rusted, or a hammer to replace the one that got carried off by a manticore, but he’s got serious stuff to buy this time and he’s glad to have someone coming along to help make choices. Dipper’s a smart dude, and even if he doesn’t know much about power tools, Soos figures he can still help find a replacement for his favorite and slightly-malfunctioning electric drill, Sparky.

“Why Sparky?” Dipper asks, and makes a face when Soos pulls the drill’s trigger, setting off a shower of electricity.

“Oh. Makes sense.”

Soos says maybe they can lay old Sparky to rest later, if Dipper wants. Like, burial style. Maybe read some eulogies. Just an offer.

“A tool funeral,” Dipper says as they browse the aisles of the local hardware store, and nods, “Sounds better than being at the shack while Mabel tries to contact the dead or whatever with her friends.”

And Soos gets nervous, because even though he’s literally _been_ a zombie, contacting the dead is some messed up stuff. Abuelita would have a nervous breakdown, probably, if she knew half the stuff that went on in the Mystery Shack.

“I don’t think she’s actually contacting the dead,” Dipper says. He doesn’t sound super sure, “I don’t know what she’s doing, honestly. She said something about a magic mirror, but that could mean anything.”

Soos imagines something from a fairytale, Mabel dressed like a queen and asking a huge old mirror to show her faraway things. He imagines something out of a horror movie, creepy kids with their heads on backwards crawling out of glass to gather souls at Mabel’s sleepover.

Neither idea is likely, but he really hopes it’s not the second one. Cool as some of that spooky stuff can be, he doesn’t want anybody to get their soul sucked out.

“You know,” Dipper says, picking up and putting back a clearance set of drill bits that’s been knocked open, “If you ever need help fixing stuff around the Shack, you could ask us. Mabel and I, I mean. I know sometimes Stan gives you a lot to do, and you don’t have the best equipment…” He trails off, shrugs, “We could probably fix a lot of stuff with magic now, is all.”

Soos laughs. He’s pretty sure, but doesn’t say, that Dipper couldn’t fix his way out of a paper bag. Dipper’s an idea guy, not a hands on guy. He’s seen the kid destroy a birdhouse with only a set of instructions and a bottle of wood glue. He’s not sure he wants to see what would happen if there was dream magic involved.

Mabel might stand a better chance since she’s crafty, which is a cousin of handy, but then, he’s pretty sure Stan doesn’t want his squeaky door hinges to sparkle or his front steps to sing when they’re stepped on.

He says he appreciates the offer, really, but it’s not necessary. He’s the handy man, this is what he does. If the magic twins started fixing everything, he’d probably be out of a job!

Kind of a joke. Kind of.

“I’m pretty sure the shack would fall apart without you,” Dipper says, which might be one of the nicest compliments Soos has ever been given, and which makes him smile ear to ear.

He tells Dipper that he’d get the heebie jeebies working around a house that was all held together with magic anyway, and Dipper looks up at him, confused.

“What’s up with that though?” He asks, “You’ve got no problem with monsters and dinosaurs and stuff, but you get weird about magic.”

Not all magic, Soos thinks. He likes rabbits that come out of hats. He likes light shows and smoke pellets. He likes the magic of special effects in movies, and the kind of magic you tell little kids about so they put teeth under their pillows or wait up at night for big jolly dudes who bring them presents. He even likes some of what Mabel’s got, all the good luck charms and lockets with wishes in them.

But they’re talking about Dipper’s kind of magic. Or, that’s what Soos thinks he’s asking about anyway.

He shrugs, says he doesn’t mind monsters because they’re stuff you fight. Monsters are right in front of you, all obvious. Magic is like, whoa, unknown territory. He can’t get his head around all that alakazam-kapow-fwoosh-

Magic stuff, you know?

“Huh-“ Dipper says, or maybe it’s more like, “Uh…”

Soos turns around to say that he’s pretty sure all the power tools are locked up in a case in aisle three but when he does, Dipper is gone.

And he could just as easily chalk it up to Dipper wandering off because he thought he saw Bigfoot or something, but there’s a slight crackle of electricity in the air and he was gone _so_ fast-

Which means those must have been real magic words, not just fake ones, that Soos said, and he may have just banished Dipper to the seventh nightmare realm or something and he might be panicking.

He looks down the next aisle, just in case, but there’s no Dipper in sight.

Not down the next aisle either.

And this is _exactly_ why he’s weird about magic.

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“Mabel _what_ do you wa- wh-what- what’s going on?”

Wendy listens in from the closet, Candy and Grenda on either side, while the Pines twins sort out their daily dose of magical trouble.

She’s already gone toe to toe with her alternate futures, ripping the feather extensions out of one’s hair and flat out breaking the nose of one who looked, admittedly, pretty sweet in a suit and tie. But they splintered and multiplied with each attack, shattering in places and reflecting back even more versions of a life that she could, or could not, lead, and honestly her head is pounding.

If she never sees another mirror again it’ll be too soon.

Without a clear plan on what to do in this situation, Mabel had ushered her friends into the closet and out of harm’s way, throwing Wendy in with them since she’s the one that the weird mirror versions of herself seem to be after.

She tried shouting through the door that Mabel shouldn’t be fighting with anyone on her own, but it was a useless argument from the start; Mabel never fights alone.

“I know, I know, you were probably busy with your tool party at the tool store,” Mabel is saying, And I’m _sorry_ I summoned you I _know_ you hate that but look-“

Wendy imagines Mabel gesturing at the horde of other-Wendys, imagines Dipper doing that funny flustered sputtering thing he does sometimes and sure enough-

“Pffwha- but- Mabel what did you guys _do?”_

His voice cracks, but then again so does Mabel’s when she gets louder, more frantic.

“It doesn’t matter right now Dipper, just help me get rid of them!”

The other Wendys don’t speak, only make sharp noises, all cracking glass panels and ground down dust.

“I had a nightmare like this once,” Dipper says, doing that other slightly less funny thing where he says _way_ too much out loud, “Well, kind of a nightmare. Sort of-“

“ _Dipper_ -“ Mabel says, and if they weren’t all in mortal peril, Wendy would be laughing right now.

She’s still laughing, a little, even though she’s also kind of freaking out.

On her left side Candy complains that she doesn’t get to see any of the action, while on her right Grenda asks if she’s having an identity crisis after punching herself in the face.

Wendy shrugs as casually as she can, says that it isn’t the first time she’s had to do it, and both girls turn to look at her in something like awe.

They all listen in while the Pines twins fight a growing army of splintered Wendys, wincing through the crashing and growling and twin banter which is, as Grenda says, “sometimes way less cute than they think it is honestly.”

Wendy hears the telltale sound of a portal being opened, not the kind you talk to but the kind you throw stuff into, and the fact that she knows the difference now is kind of ridiculous but kind of cool, and after that the room is quiet.

Mabel unlocks the closet door, slips the necklace she’d wedged around the knob back around her neck instead. She says, “Sorry about all that, girls,” Then, to Wendy, “You put up a heck of a fight!”

Wendy shrugs as they file back out of the closet, only a little smug. Of course she put up a good fight. All of the hers would, naturally. She doesn’t ask where the other version of her went, since she really, really doesn’t want to know, and neither of the twins volunteer the information.

“That would’ve been easier if I could melt you with soda,” Dipper says, looking more tired than usual, and Wendy just laughs at the nonsensical statement.

Dude almost _never_ makes sense.

They stand in a circle around the remains of Mabel’s mirror, awkwardly shuffling their feet, till Dipper turns to his sister and asks if he can leave.

“I kind of left Soos hanging,” He says, leveling Mabel with a look that makes it clear the ‘I’ in his statement is really more of a ‘you.’

“Oop- sorry bro,” She says, and reaches a hand up to the tiny mark behind her ear, the one that Wendy put there, mutters something under her breath, and in an instant Dipper is gone.

Mabel steps cleanly into the space he had been standing, as if this is all so normal, and says, “So how about that pizza?”

And Wendy follows her and Candy and Grenda down the stairs, discussing toppings as they go, and thinks about how weird their town is and how weird the Pines are, especially, and how much she likes them anyway. She thinks she could probably use therapy after all these strange adventures, but that she’ll probably just chop down a tree to make herself feel better instead.

She says next time they do Girls Night they can come to her place, but Mabel has to promise not to bring anything magic, and also to send all her brothers out as effectively as she did to her own family.

But not like, into another dimension or whatever.

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“And the missing child is, I’m sorry- how old?”

Like, fourteen? Fifteen? More like a teenager than a kid, definitely. Soos can’t remember when his head is buzzing like this. He’s kind of freaking out right now. Dipper is missing and it’s probably his fault and Mr. Pines will _definitely_ kill him.

He wants the bored looking attendant at the customer service desk to get on the radio thing, you know, the announcement system, and call Dipper to the front desk in the vague hope that he’ll hear it from whatever alternate universe he just poofed away to. Do they have those systems in other universes? There’s always a chance, or, a hope.

“Ummm…” The customer service person says, one hand on the phone without any intent to call anyone, probably.

“Soos!” Someone calls behind him. Someone familiar. Someone who’s come into the room with a crackle of energy, and as Soos turns around to see Dipper he just barely catches the customer service person’s mouth falling open. The Pines twins seem to have that effect on people, even when they’re not together.

Soos doesn’t remember using any other magic words in the past few minutes, but here Dipper is, back from the unknown. Unless numbers are magic? He always knew he should have paid more attention in math.

Dipper jogs up to meet him from aisle five, smiling in an embarrassed, apologetic sort of way.

“Sorry about that,” Dipper says, “Mabel called me and…” He trails off, shrugs.

And Soos doesn’t question it. He gets the twin thing, the sibling thing. He doesn’t know just how Dipper poofed into and out of the building, or where he went to anyway, but if Mabel was at that mystery location, it makes sense. Half-sense, at least, which is about a quarter more sense than a lot of other things he’s seen. So, enough sense.

He shrugs it off, tells Dipper not to sweat it. Just maybe let him know next time if he’s disappearing?

Dipper sighs a long, weary sigh. He says, “I’ll work on it. Did you find the drill you needed?”

And he did, actually, in spite of the momentary panic at losing his boss’s great-nephew, losing a friend, to the void. It was in aisle three, where he thought it’d be.

“Cool,” Dipper says. He blinks a few times, like he’s overtired, sleep-deprived, and Soos is pretty sure his eyes glow blue for a second, but when he stands up straighter he seems fine, “If there’s money left over we should get something to eat. Tacos, maybe. You good for tacos?”

Soos is always good for tacos, for any food really, and he figures between now and dinner they can find time to lay his old electric drill to rest.

“Or maybe Mabel can try and fix it for you,” Dipper suggests, “Make it shoot rainbows or something.”

And _that_ is a magic idea Soos can get behind.

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	10. And A Remembrance

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Stan Pines is a self-centered, self-absorbed, obstinate jerk with little to no regard for other people’s feelings or opinions. That’s just a fact. A fact he’s proud of, honestly.

Being this way hasn’t earned him many friends, but he’s not the kind of guy who needs a lot of friends. He’s got his home, his business, one and the same. He’s got enough money to keep himself at least relatively comfortable, and enough schemes to keep him busy while he tries to bring in even more money.

He’s got some things he doesn’t want to talk about anymore, and some that he’s dreading coming to light. Soon, he thinks, soon. It’s a promise, but also a sigh of regret.

He’s got a big old arm chair that’s _his_ and a gorgeous painting on a sheet of velvet that’s _his_ (now) and a reputation that’s most definitely _his_ , and he’s proud of those things too.

He’s proud of a few people other than himself, but for admittedly self-serving reasons. Stan Pines is the kind of guy who looks for familiar qualities in the people he chooses to keep around. It makes it easier, putting up with them, when he can see a bit of himself in whatever they do. It makes them likeable, in his eyes.

He likes Wendy, for example. He respects her total lack of respect for authority. She reminds him of himself as a teen; awful. Like all teenagers are. But Wendy’s maybe the least awful, the one he likes best, and as much as she puts off work and gives him sass and makes fun of him behind his back, he likes having her around. She’s a halfway decent cashier.

He likes Soos, honestly, though he hates to admit it. Soos reminds him of himself in his 20s, a little directionless, a little pathetic. Stan can imagine him selling vacuums door to door, getting those doors slammed in his face, and keeping on with it anyway. Soos is loyal, works harder than Stan ever did, and the little bit of hero worship he displays doesn’t hurt either. Soos is a good guy, an okay handyman.

He likes the kids, and probably would even if they were nothing like him, because they’re his kids and what are you going to do?

They’re a pair, Dipper and Mabel, but he hardly ever looks at them that way. They’re two individual pains in his ass, two bright stars in a world that’s increasingly grey, and if he was the kind of guy who carried pictures in his wallet, or carried a wallet at all (money belongs under a mattress or in several lead boxes buried in secret locations,) he’d have pictures of them there. Separate ones, the kind they take of kids at school.

He’s pretty sure he’s got some of those laying around somewhere.

He likes Mabel, and it’s no secret. She’s a sneaky little weasel like him, is funny as all get out. She’s never as mean as him, no one is, but she’s got a wicked streak that lets her sling insults, show her teeth, with the best of them. She’s got one hell of a poker face, and a smile that makes him feel like he’s got a heart when he looks at it too long. She weaves tall tales _and_ friendship bracelets, and if that isn’t talent, he doesn’t know what is.

She’s got this bunch of magic garbage, and he doesn’t like that. Not even a little. Every time he sees her with something new and sparkly he pretends like it isn’t there, pokes at it suspiciously, later, if she leaves it out in the open.

He doesn’t trust this stuff. It’s dangerous, is what it is. It’s borrowed trouble.

When the kid offers him charms he scoffs and shoves them in his back pocket without so much as a thank you, hides them away later to dismantle, to make sure they won’t break, won’t burn her.

He worries about that kid.

He worries more about Dipper, because well, it’s Dipper.

Dipper seems to think Stan doesn’t like him, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. He admires the kids’ determination, the underhanded way he sometimes goes about getting what he wants. He’s as much of a liar and a cheat as the rest of them, when he has to be, and his passion for revenge is something Stan appreciates like a fine wine. Dipper’s got good ideas, when he’s not all hung up on hunting for stuff he shouldn’t be seeing in the woods.

But of course that’s all he really wants to do. It drives Stan right up the wall when the kid goes behind his back and gets into trouble. And now look at him! All glowing eyes and turning rooms sideways. Like hell he stopped looking for trouble, the little imp.

Dipper is frustrating; too inquisitive, too observant. He gets underfoot and understands too much, so that Stan has to build lies on top of lies to keep him out of business that shouldn’t concern him anyway.

He hopes it never concerns him, at least, though that’s probably a pointless wish.

All of the Pines have a habit of getting in over their heads, after all.

Stan’s already had to help the kids out of more sticky situations than he cares to think about, and those kind of shenanigans aren’t getting any easier with age. He watches out for them, watches their backs when they’ve got more eyes on them than they realize.

There are government agents with investigations underway, things that live under rocks and up in the trees but are always watching, listening. There are powers at play that are so far beyond a pair of kids spending a summer in the woods, and the last thing he wants is for them to have to face those.

It wouldn’t end well. It couldn’t.

He looks the other way more than he probably should.

They’re good at finding their own way out of a mess, at least, most of the time. Twins are usually good for that, aren’t they? Usually.

But when Mabel finds a magic flute that puts her brother into one hell of a trance after she tries to play Hot Cross Buns on it, Stan has to step in.

When Dipper makes a deal with the queen of the goddamn elves without realizing that it means his sister stays _inside_ the fairy ring, _yes_ forever, Stan has to step in.

He snatches dangerous trinkets out of Mabel’s hands and snaps at her to quit jumping into things. She’s gonna get herself killed, being so impulsive. Show a little restraint!

He biffs Dipper upside the head and tells him he might be smart but he’s not as smart as he _thinks_ he is, which sounds cruel but is the cold, hard truth and the kid’s got to learn sooner rather than later that his bright ideas will get him into just as much trouble as they will out of it.

Damn kids, always rushing into things. Always thinking they know better than anybody else.

That’s how you end up in a prison in Columbia, or with a whole bunch of old wounds that ache when it rains, or with an empty old house with too many secret rooms and nobody to fill them in the winter months.

That’s no way to be.

But he knows the kids aren’t just like him. Even if they share some similarities, they’re their own people. Mabel is too sweet, loves too much, to ever be totally alone. Dipper is too careful to lose much more than himself.

They worry him, the way that kids always make people worry just by existing in a world that can hurt them, but they surprise him too. They save their own skins, save each other, time and again. Even when they come home bruised and dust-covered or doused in magic potions or flickering in and out of sight, they’re alright.

He was always alright too, except for when he wasn’t.

But hey, maybe they’ll do better. They’ll _definitely_ do better. They’re good kids, on their way to being great adults, and all the dark, terrifying, unknown things in the world can’t stop them from coming into their own.

They’ll be okay. He thinks. He hopes. He’s pretty damn sure.

He watches the two of them from the front door of the shack, wandering into the woods with Wendy along to punch out whatever creatures come after them, with Soos to pick them up and carry them away from danger.

He sees Mabel set her rings to seek, to stun, sees Dipper flip through the pages of a book he isn’t supposed to have, one that levitates and glows blue now when he holds it, and he shakes his head in amazed disapproval.

Little hell raisers, the both of them.

He doesn’t know where they get it from.

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	11. The Fever

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edited 12/19/14 to include a follow up piece.

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Dipper is under self-imposed house arrest for the week.

He’s come down with something- or maybe it’s just allergies, though he’s never had this much of a problem with dust or ragweed or whatever before.

“It’s probably all the pixie dust,” Mabel suggests, and Dipper thinks she might be right. There’s a full scale fairy migration going on, from one meadow to another, and the air around town is choked with little particles of sparkling gold. Mabel is loving it, naturally, keeps commenting on how pretty it all is.

Dipper, on the other hand-

“He’s mostly just sneezing,” Mabel tells Pacifica on the phone, and the fact that she’s sharing that information with Pacifica, is talking to her at all, makes Dipper twice as grouchy about his current state of affairs, “No fever, I think. But yeah, we’re in sneeze city over here. No way is Dip coming with me.”

To Pacifica’s party, that is. Mabel’s been invited out of some weird hate-friend obligation, and Dipper by extension, although there’s no way he’d be going even if he wasn’t sneezing and sniffling every five seconds. He’s chock full of something other than allergens and it’s called spite. You couldn’t pay him to go to Pacifica Northwest’s house and sit around while she struggles not to insult anyone over gourmet chips and dip.

“At least she’s trying,” Mabel says in a whisper, hand over the receiver. She’s almost pleading, but no. Dipper will not be moved, not on this. He refuses to be friends with Pacifica and especially refuses to go to any of her stupid mansion parties.

Especially _especially_ now, since his nose is twice as red as usual and his eyes are all watery and they glow when he sneezes. Besides, he’s got that kitten sneeze, still, which is an embarrassment on its own. _Also_ things get weird, magically speaking, when he sneezes, and that is as embarrassing as it is potentially dangerous.

So there’s lots of reasons for him to stay under house arrest. He offers to write them all down for Mabel, in list form, in decreasing order of importance, but she says, “Please don’t.”

Dipper sits in Grunkle Stan’s chair by himself (illegal, totally illegal,) hoarding a box of tissues and frowning hard enough that he might be developing permanent wrinkles while Mabel finishes up on the phone with Pacifica, promising to bring her own punch, _insisting_ in fact, even when Pacifica tells her no, don’t, ew, no, she still has a plastic dinosaur trapped in her esophagus from last time, probably.

“You would’ve choked on it by now if you did, silly!” Mabel coos, halfway between fond and threatening and wow, Dipper _really_ does not get girls.

When Mabel finally hangs up she turns to face Dipper with a concerned expression, thoughtful, and he shakes his head before she can even say what’s on her mind.

He doesn’t need medical attention, if that’s what she’s thinking. He’s been under the care of ‘Doctor Mabel’ before and it never left him in better health. With a mouthful of crayons? Yes. With orange juice in his hair? Definitely. But not in better health.

“But you look so sad,” Mabel says, pouting, “Isn’t there something that’ll make you feel better? I could check the journal, maybe. There’s got to be a kind of pixie dust prevention in there somewhere.”

There isn’t. Dipper checked already, twice. He swears he’s just sick, not sad, although it isn’t entirely true. He’s just the tiniest bit homesick, which is both a kind of sick and a kind of sad.

Usually he’s more than happy to stay at the Shack all summer, take a break from being at school and being at home, where there isn’t enough going on to keep him interested, where the only good mysteries are in books. He’s only found _one_ supernatural creature back at home in all the time since they started spending their summers in Gravity Falls and it was an enchanted duck.

Not exactly exciting.

He doesn’t wish he was home, not really, but he half-wishes his parents were here with him. They’re the ones that take care of him when he’s sick, in shifts, in the way they learned to switch off with two toddlers sharing chicken pox or stomach flues. He wants them here to take turns checking his forehead for signs of the fever he doesn’t have, to pop in and offer him something to eat, to ask if he needs more tissues or a blanket, to see if he’s doing okay.

He wants to be coddled, a little, and he will _not_ say so to Mabel, in case she teases him or worse, tries to do so herself.

It’s better that he resigns himself to a week of sniffling on his own. He’s probably getting too old to have his parents taking care of him like that anyway.

He’ll muddle through this like a grown up.

He sneezes, too late to even grab a new tissue, and a vulture spontaneously appears on the arm of the chair.

Weird. It’s weird, weird, weird. Not the fun kind, either. _This_ is the kind of thing he wants to avoid.

He has to focus hard to make the bird disappear again, which is hard when he’s congested and his head hurts, but he wants it out of the room before it tries to peck someone, or before Mabel names it.

The vulture vanishes with a faint _pop_ and Dipper snatches up another tissue, hides his face in it.

“It could be worse,” Mabel says, and Dipper thinks no, this is probably the worst, “At least nothing’s on fire!”

Not yet.

“I’m gonna go get dolled up,” Mabel says, winking, “Dress to impress, you know? Yell if you need anything, bro.”

Dipper makes vague grumbling noises at her until she turns and skips up the stairs to choose her glittery ensemble for the evening.

He sneezes again and finds himself floating a foot above the chair, has to make a conscious effort to stay grounded.

Again, and his eyes won’t stop glowing no matter how much he tries to blink it away.

_Again_ , and the room feels different in fifteen little ways that he can’t quite place.

“Are you sure you don’t want to come with?” Mabel calls downstairs, “I mean, everybody _knows_ about your dream stuff. It’s not like anyone’s going to freak out about a few wild animals or like, the walls changing places.”

It’s not so much the walls Dipper is worried about. Or people freaking out, though he’d like to avoid that too. No matter what Mabel says, he doesn’t really think everyone is as okay with him bending reality as they pretend to be. And although none of his unpredictable powers have caused anything _too_ terrible so far, he can never forget the source of them and worries, more often than he even lets on, that he’ll accidentally do something unforgivable.

He thinks of deer teeth and distant screams and the strange pull of a soul leaving a body, and shudders.

He calls back up to Mabel, insisting that he doesn’t want to go, and punctuates it with a surprisingly well timed sneeze. A few of the floor boards pop up, nail themselves back down more evenly than before while he wipes his nose, and he winces at the creaky sound of it. He sniffles and grabs another tissue before he can do anything to mess _those_ up too.

Dipper holds very still, breathes extra carefully, trying to avoid another sneeze, and that works for a few minutes, until Mabel says she wants his honest opinion on her outfit choice, and his body betrays him in a sneezing attack that could possibly kill a lesser man. A lesser boy? A lesser demon powered type person.

By the time Mabel comes back downstairs, Grunkle Stan’s chair has turned 45 degrees to the left, the lamp is on the ceiling, and Dipper’s clothes are all different colors with, in a few spots, new textures as well.

His shorts have gone tye-dye, which is a travesty, but makes Mabel shriek in delight.

“Broseph and the amazing technicolor dream shorts!” She calls him, and laughs till she wheezes.

He tells her, grudgingly, once she’s got a hold of herself, that she looks nice.

And she does; in tights that look like a swimming pool surface and a sweater with little raindrops stitched from top to bottom. Her necklace has a darker stone set in it, one that matches her skirt, and Dipper knows that’s for protection as much as it is for coordination. If he’s remembering right, that’s the one that makes force fields.

He sneezes again, just once, and Mabel’s necklace sparks like it’s been struck, deflecting whatever power is at work, shooting it off in different directions. The carpet twists at the edges, rippling a little in a circular motion, inward, back toward the center where Mabel stands.

Dipper tries to warn her to move, but she stands her ground, laughs as the crackle of energy moves back up around her, gentle as a static cling. Her skirt sprouts little vines along the edges like trim, while her hair goes kind of green around the bangs. And that’s it.

“That wasn’t so bad,” She says, already admiring the addition to her outfit, “I’m not even on fire!”

And Dipper tries to apologize, because he really didn’t mean to do that, and says he can fix it, or undo it, or maybe she should just get out of here before he does something worse, or-

But Mabel waves him off. She says, “It’s perfect.”

And though he’s still generally concerned, still seriously sniffly, he does feel a little bit better when she does a smug twirl to make the vines on her skirt wave.

“Pacifica will _hate_ it,” Mabel says, beaming.

Which almost makes up for being under allergy induced house arrest.

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Dipper is sleeping sprawled across Grukle Stan’s chair with the television still on when Mabel gets home from Pacifica’s party.

Or rather, he’s _trying_ to sleep. He’s too congested to breathe properly, so it’s kind of hard to get comfortable. This is definitely an improvement from the constant sneezing of a few hours ago, but while he isn’t accidentally warping the world around him, his head hurts and he’s getting irritable from the lack of sleep.

On the whole, he wouldn’t recommend a pixie dust allergy to anyone.

“Hey Dip,” Mabel whisper-calls from the door, already knowing he won’t be asleep.

He checks the time on the ancient VCR, only a few minutes off from what it should be- it’s not even that late.

“What’re you doing home already?” He asks when Mabel comes into the room.

She shrugs, toeing off her jelly flats and dropping her purse, “Just didn’t feel like staying too late.”

And he looks her over suspiciously, because Mabel Pines never leaves a party early.

“And _maybe_ I wanted to check on you,” She admits, padding across the room to get a better look at him. While Dipper certainly isn’t sleeping, Grunkle Stan might be, so they both have to keep quiet or risk dealing with an even grouchier old man than usual in the morning.

“You don’t have to check on me,” Dipper insists, though she’s already home and inspecting him for signs of damage or general sickliness. He can’t quite bring himself to lie and say he doesn’t appreciate her concern, so instead he asks, “How was Pacifica’s gala?”

“It was nice,” She says, ignoring his sarcasm, “All your clothes are back to normal.”

Dipper glances down, shrugs. His shorts are back to their usual color, at least. His shirt feels rumpled, but that’s more due to lying at an odd angle than it is to any kind of magic, “Yours too.”

“Yeah, the vines fell off eventually,” Mabel says, stepping back from him. Her hair has lost its green tinge too, though at some point she changed the style, twisting it up into a messy bun, “How are you feeling?”

Dipper shrugs again, says, “Eh.”

“Eh, eh?” Mabel asks, emphasizing one eh over the other to make him smile, “Ehs are unaccept- _eh_ -ble. I could bring you some tea if you want. Or maybe juice?”

Dipper knows better than to trust Mabel with tea; she always gets the loose stuff, mixes it up in funny ways. He’s not even a fan of tea when it’s not five different flavors and mixed with a full bag of sugar.

“I don’t need a juice bath, if that’s what you mean.”

“You pour juice on a guy _one_ time,” Mabel says, turning her back to him so she can stoop low and go through her purse. She pulls something out of it, fidgets with a container that snaps and pops as she breaks it, “Here we go. Now try this.”

She stands back up and turns to offer Dipper a handful of something that he’s hesitant to accept.

“Did you find a magic potion or something?” He asks, putting his hand out nervously. It’s not that he doesn’t trust her, he just doesn’t trust a lot of other things and sometimes the feeling bleeds over.

“Yeah,” Mabel says with a laugh, “In the mystic shelves of the supermarket health aisle,” She drops two tiny pills into Dipper’s open palm, stands nearby while he inspects them in the light of the television’s glow, waiting, “I don’t know if allergy medication will actually _help_ or not, but I felt bad since you were here being all…sick.”

“Oh,” He says, looking down at the pink pills in his hand, thinking that the stores in Gravity Falls never stay open very late, that Pacifica’s get togethers usually run till the small hours of the morning.

“Anyway,” Mabel says, “If they work there’s like, a week’s worth in the package. And I guess I’ll leave you alone to sleep, if you don’t need anything…?”

She leaves him an opening, free reign to jump in with a request, and though she’s already done more than enough, he takes it.

“Actually,” He says, “If you’re not tired or anything, would you mind, um. Maybe you could hang out a while?” He looks from Mabel to the television, gestures vaguely at it with a fist full of allergy meds, “That late night gemstone shopping network show with the really loud presenter is coming on soon, and I thought maybe you’d want to call them and ask them weird questions about the jewels in funny voices.”

Mabel grins, says, “That is _exactly_ what I want to do.”

She drops into her spot in Grunkle Stan’s chair before Dipper has even properly moved his feet out of it. She takes up the remote to preemptively adjust the volume and asks, “So you stopped sneezing around...what? Eight o’clock?”

“Um. Yeah? How did you-“

“That’s when all the car alarms in town finally stopped going off.”

And though Dipper already feels better, not even that uncomfortable anymore, he pops the pills Mabel gave him into his mouth and swallows them quick. He doesn’t know if they’ll help, but they probably won’t hurt, and he’s hoping to be in sneeze-free condition tomorrow when he leaves the shack to clean up whatever small-scale devastation his allergies have caused.

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	12. The Threat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I always try to update the tags accordingly, but I'll mention here too; minor body horror in this one, tread carefully if you're iffy about shapeshifting.

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It is possibly the hottest day of the year.

The town pool is closed due to an incident with a Viking ghost fleet and the lake has been overtaken by gnomes, but the limited air conditioning in the Mystery Shack gift shop still isn’t enough to draw in customers out of the heat, or keep the employees at their stations, for that matter.

Mabel is in front of a mirror instead of a cash register, sighing, frowning. It’s not a familiar situation.

Mabel is an eternal optimist, a go with the flow kind of girl, always good for a positive spin.

Today though, she’s having hard time keeping upbeat.

Because when she looks in her holographic compact mirror all she can see are the new red blotches on her face, breakouts all across her cheeks, a little on her chin. Acne sucks. Puberty sucks.

She tries not to complain to Dipper, both on principle and because he’s got it just as bad, this being teenaged thing, but she can’t help making frustrated noises at her reflection and since he’s the only one around, he can’t help noticing.

He doesn’t say anything, just looks up at her from the floor, where he’s parked in front of a fan, without his usual number of layers, without even his hat. It’s too hot for hats.

It’s too hot for makeup too, which has Mabel even more frustrated. It’s too hot for her to put on a sweater and pull it up over her face to hide- she’s in tank top territory and it’s no fun. It’s probably too hot to steal one of the big feathery masks Grunkle Stan has been saving for a display he hasn’t come up with a name for yet, but Mabel still considers it. Anything to cover up.

She isn’t used to feeling less than adorable. She doesn’t like it.

“Maybe we can see a movie later,” Dipper suggests, though he sounds tired at the notion of even getting up off the floor, “They have air conditioning. Or go to the library. Or the mall- I’ll even brave the mall.”

Mabel frowns a frownier face. She does _not_ want to brave the mall.

She suggests maybe lying in pools of their own sweat and waiting to dehydrate and shrivel up.

“Or that,” Dipper says, not arguing, but not playing into her moping either.

Mabel sighs a few more times and Dipper ignores it a few more before something catches them both mid-laze. It’s something in the air, first, then something in the tips of their fingers, a tingle.

It’s a familiar feeling.

Dipper looks up at her, sharp, and she nods; she feels it too. This pull, this energy, it feels just like when she summons Dipper to her side, or vice versa. The mark hidden under her hair seems to itch, though she’s pretty sure that’s just her imagination.

But both of them are in the same room, definitely not summoning each other.

“Who else would know-“ Dipper starts to say, but he knows Mabel won’t have an answer, just stands up so she can dart forward and grab his hand in time, holding tight as the energy spikes. The room around them fades and in one held-in breath they’re deposited somewhere else entirely, clumsily, as if dropped from the sky.

Out in the woods.

They’re out in the woods and it’s mid-afternoon and though the shade of the trees actually makes it pretty comfortable, this is no place to be.

“Mabel,” Dipper says, low, serious. There’s fear creeping into his voice and that alone makes her want to curl up in a ball and hide, “This is…”

He doesn’t finish the thought, doesn’t have to. Mabel can look around and know exactly how far from the Shack they are, exactly what part of the woods they’re in. She followed a path of clues to this very spot once, with a similar fear making her throat feel tight. She found her brother in this spot once, bleary eyed and full of strange magic and thankfully not dead.

Mabel knows exactly where they are and for that reason she will not let go of Dipper’s hand.

They’ve prepared for this, at least. They expected it. Or, Dipper expected it, while Mabel simply hoped for the best.

“You can’t just steal from a trans dimensional dream demon and not have them come after you,” Dipper had reasoned, so many months ago, bent over a book on demonology and asking Mabel, between pages, which precious metals she thought would _actually_ offer the best protection.

And now she wishes it wasn’t so hot, that she had worn _so_ much more jewelry, because all she’s got is one ring on her finger and a beaded bracelet balled up in her skirt pocket. Her earrings aren’t even magic, just junk from the mall, but they’re little ice cream cones and were too cute to ignore.

She has never felt so bitter about tiny ice cream cones before in her life.

But she’s hopeful, faithful even. She holds her brother’s hand tight enough to hurt and thinks that they can do this, they can face off against a demon. They’ve done it before, together, separately, and this time they’re better informed, better prepared. They can do this.

But the trees around them are green and lush, not withering to grey in the mindscape. There are no quaking forest creatures or unravelling bodies or shrieks from the beyond, no enormous all-knowing eye.

There’s no Bill.

What there is though, in the shadow of a tree, relaxing against its trunk, is a teenaged boy in a soft summer suit.

“Well, well, well,” He says, and Mabel would recognize that drawl anywhere, “If it isn’t the _Magic_ Twins,” He steps into the light, victorious grin already in place, and Mabel feels Dipper tense beside her; he’d recognize that _hair_ anywhere, “Bet you thought you’d seen the last of lil’ old me!”

“Gideon,” Dipper says, more surprised squawk than spiteful whisper, and Mabel would roll her eyes at him for playing into the cliché captured hero role, but she finds herself hissing at the name, just as captured and just as clichéd.

Or, perhaps as captured. She jumps up, Dipper’s hand still in hers, and rushes the boy. She’s stronger, she thinks, she can take him. She’ll punch him right in the smug little face and push his nice white suit in the _dirt_. She’ll make him _eat_ the dirt, she _so_ will, don’t test her-

But as she tries to drag Dipper along with her she realizes two things; one, there’s a force field around them, something invisible that rises in a circular glow when she tries to step too far forward, stopping her with a static spark. Two, Dipper is not standing. Not moving much at all, actually, and that can’t be good.

She looks down at him, sees the wince of pain on his face when she tries to pull at him too hard, and stops. She stoops down beside him instead, still holding on, moving closer even.

“Sorry,” He whispers, “I’m really tired all of a sudden, just…drained. I think this is some kind of binding circle.”

“All this power and you still haven’t managed some good ol’ fashioned telepathy?” Gideon says, and clicks his tongue in disapproval, “I was expecting more from you two, to be honest.”

Mabel growls, throws up a fist against the force field and feels the spark of it burn against her hand. It doesn’t do much but vent her frustration, and Gideon laughs at the display.

“So feisty!” He says, half-mocking but nearly fond, “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.” He looks at her like he wishes she were outside the circle, were holding his hand instead, and the expression turns her stomach, makes her heart hurt a little.

If things were different, she thinks, if they just could have been friends-

“What is all this Gideon?” Dipper asks, and sits up a little straighter, to seem slightly less pathetic on the ground, “What are you even doing back in town?”

Both good questions, though Gideon isn’t in a hurry to answer either as he strolls around the circle holding them in, “It really is a delight to see you,” He says, looking only at Mabel, “After all these years, why, Mabel Pines, you’re still prettier than a petunia.”

Mabel tries hard not to flinch, doesn’t quite succeed. She thinks of her blotchy skin, of how her hair is probably frizzing up from the humidity out here. She thinks she must look like a mess, and is sure Gideon will scrutinize her for it, but he just keeps looking into her eyes from outside the circle, caught on something like a sigh, and she bares her teeth at him in an effort to be uglier.

As much as she hates feeling less than adorable, she doesn’t want to be any kind of pretty where he can see.

“Still lovely,” He says, and he does look away then, but only to turn his attention to Dipper, to curl his lip in a snarl, “Even after _you_ invoked dark and mysterious forces on such a precious peach!”

Dipper looks to her, eyebrows raised in confusion, and she mirrors the expression.

“What are you talking about?” Dipper asks, and Mabel can’t help noticing that he sounds short of breath, looks flushed.

“Don’t you know I’ve been keepin’ tabs on things here?” Gideon asks with a laugh, anger fading at the chance to gloat, “Anybody who thinks I haven’t been spyin’ on all of Gravity Falls while I was locked up is a fool,” He looks pointedly at Dipper, whose face goes that much pinker in embarrassment.

Mabel squeezes his hand, reassuring, can already imagine how he’s beating himself up. They should have prepared for this, he’s probably thinking, should have expected it. They should have worried less about dream demons and more about a kid they sent to jail, a kid whose sentence would eventually be up.

“I learned an awful lot in prison, gosh golly,” Gideon tells them, “They don’t deny you books, after all. And you know the value of a good book,” He grins, staring right down at Dipper and in that moment, Mabel wants to recapture his attention more than anything, to keep him from looking at her brother like he’s something to play with, to break and leave behind.

She snaps at him, says he obviously didn’t learn how to be a decent person, and his expression is one of hurt.

“Oh, but I learned so many other things. How to put together a nifty little circle like this one, for example,” He says, gesturing to the space around them. It glows under his hands, under fingers wrapped up in multicolored bandages, “It only takes a _little_ blood,” He admits, “And it oughta hold anything less than a level three demon, and let’s face it, y’all ain’t exactly masters of the craft.”

Mabel looks to her brother, brow furrowed in confusion, in near-understanding.

Does he think they have the same powers?

“I’ve heard _all_ about your little misadventures,” Gideon continues, chuckling, “All your funny magic and floating and starting fires and rearranging the particles of universe,” He looks at Dipper, and even when Mabel growls to distract him, he stays focused. He leans in close, too close, nearly against the barrier he’s built, and whispers, “Sounds to me like what you’re lackin’ is control.”

He snaps his fingers and the circle around them glows bright, lights up in markings under their feet, and while Mabel is left blinking, Dipper sucks in a gasp like he’s in pain. Gideon watches them, smiling at Dipper’s grimace, smiling wider at the way Mabel holds him steady.

“Shoulda known you’d be the strong one,” He says admiringly, and snaps his fingers again, letting the glow die down.

Mabel looks to her brother, holds his gaze. She tries to ask a wordless question and he tries his best to give her a silent answer.

Yes, Gideon does think they have the same powers. Yes, he is an idiot.

But he’s an idiot with the upper hand, and that makes them both nervous. Mabel tries to stay optimistic. She thinks of how they’ve defeated Gideon before, how _she’s_ defeated him before, but this time she doesn’t have a glowing amulet or a grappling hook. She’s got a ring that’ll tell her if a witch is nearby, and a bracelet strung with beads that are supposed to give off a cooling sensation but have never really worked.

She’s got so much back at home that would help her here, a whole collection of baubles that could save the day, but they’re all out of reach.

Dipper’s fingers shift against her hold, a squirming motion to communicate a desire to be set free. Letting go of his hand is the last thing she wants to do right now, but when she looks at him and he nods, just slightly, she obliges.

With their hands just barely touching, hovering near each other, she can reach out and touch the invisible field around them, can feel only air. It doesn’t spark or burn against her skin until the moment she interlocks her fingers with Dipper’s, connecting them physically.

She looks at her brother and nods back. He has the right idea. Gideon’s misinformation, or just misunderstanding, leaves her an opening. She could let go of Dipper’s hand and walk right through this circle, off into the woods.

But that would leave him alone.

“Now don’t get me wrong,” Gideon says, resuming his stroll around the circle, “I don’t want to hurt y’all. Even if you did land me in a cement block and rob me of all the power that’s rightfully mine,” Dipper rolls his eyes at that and Gideon frowns, snaps his fingers again so the circle glows, so Dipper whimpers, “Now what did I just say?” He dismisses the glow with a wave of his hand, smiles sweetly when he says, “I don’t want to hurt y’all. Unless you sass me.”

Mabel insists she will sass him from here to Jupiter and back again, but Gideon just laughs.

“Oh Mabel, you could sass me any day. Your spiritedness is positively enchanting.”

She tells him that even she’s never held onto a crush for so long, that he should get over it, and she isn’t just being argumentative here, she honestly thinks he needs to move on.

But Gideon’s face goes red and he shouts her down, makes her cling to Dipper’s arm in spite of herself, “My feelings will never fade!” He cries, “I thought about you every day I was locked up,” And she knows, she has the letters to prove it, “I know we could be together, Mabel, if you just get away from your toxic little family. If you drop the dead weight,” He glances at Dipper, frowns, speaks softer, “Why, you could even keep some of your power if you just promise to behave.”

“Keep?” Dipper repeats, and now he’s clinging too, holding onto Mabel like someone might snatch her away, and in the moment it seems like a very real possibility.

“Perhaps,” Gideon says, unsure, “I don’t want to put my little dumpling through any suffering, of course, and I’m sure it doesn’t feel too nice havin’ a bunch of demon powers ripped outta you.”

Dipper looks pale, and Mabel isn’t sure if that’s from discomfort or fear, but either way, it’s not a look she likes.

“What are you gonna do?” Dipper asks with a nervous, disbelieving laugh, “Exorcise us?”

Us, he says. Keeping up with the charade. He hasn’t corrected Gideon and Mabel knows why, holds his hand tighter for it, presses her nails hard enough to leave marks.

She doesn’t want to go, can’t go, can’t leave him here.

“Nothin’ so serious,” Gideon says, and leans in close again, smiling wide, “I just figure, if someone like you is able to steal power right out from under Bill Cipher, why, I should be able to take it from _you_ lickety-split!” He giggles in excitement, jumps a little like he might do some kind of pre-celebratory jig, “Now how nice’d that be? Lil’ old me with a set of dream demon powers,” He pauses, looks to Mabel, almost pleading, “And a demon queen to share ‘em with?”

She has to go. It’s their only chance.

She mimes gagging, makes Gideon turn away from her and back to Dipper, annoyed.

“I’m pretty sure it won’t kill you,” He says, flippant.

Mabel pulls her hand away from Dipper’s, almost free, hating to leave him here with those words hanging in the air.

They share a split-second glance and even without telepathy, she knows they have an understanding. Dipper gives her a look, the one that says _I want to protect you_ , and ordinarily Mabel would protest, but she shoots him a look back, the one that says _I’ve got a plan_ , and that settles it.

“Go,” Dipper says, only a little desperate, and Mabel can see the struggle in his expression as he lets go of her hand, pushes her by the fingertips alone out of the circle, into freedom.

She doesn’t hesitate. She doesn’t stop to assure Dipper she’ll be back for him, or turn to tell Gideon off even though she really, _really_ just wants to lunge at him right here, right now. She takes off running, before Gideon can do more than balk, than make a string of sounds, rather than words, almost a roar.

She blows a raspberry as she goes.

She runs and runs and runs, till the Shack is in sight, till she’s out of breath, till she feels like she’ll fall over and she wishes she’d put on a teleportation amulet today. She looks over her shoulder every few seconds, thinking that Gideon will be right behind her, fearing that she’ll hear Dipper call for help before she’s ready to provide it, but there’s nothing. She’s alone in the woods, then alone at the front steps of the shack.

She races through the house, up to her collection. She grabs up pieces as she goes, mind racing, imagining what could be happening out in the woods, inside that circle, while she hurries to arm herself.

She imagines Gideon taunting her brother, telling him he’s been abandoned and even if it isn’t true, even if Dipper knows it’s not true, the thought pains her.

She imagines Gideon hurting him, lighting that circle up so he’s drained and exhausted, aching in some non-physical way that makes him grit his teeth, cry out.

She imagines Gideon ripping the dream powers right out of him, harsher than Dipper ever was even to the demon that tried to ruin him.

She imagines Gideon as a powerful being, imagines Dipper broken, empty, imagines herself dragged away into another dimension of grey skies and warped walls and only Gideon, calling her his dumpling, burning everything she loves to the ground, taking her away from her magical, _wonderful_ family-

She gasps for air. She cries, a little, and sinks to the floor, wasting time she doesn’t have because panic is shaking her apart piece by piece.

She wonders if this is what Dipper feels like all the time; anxious, unsure, certain only that all the millions of possible outcomes for a situation will spell their doom.

She catches her breath, gets up, feels angrier than she can ever remember being. She picks up all her most terrible magic stones; the ones that shoot fire, the ones that house poison, the ones that will open a hole in the ground to swallow people up forever and ever when you touch them together.

She gathers all these up and stares at the collection of death and destruction in her hands. She thinks of Dipper, of the powers he prides himself on, the ones he’s more than a little bit afraid of. She thinks of how many things he could destroy if he wanted, of how he’ll never do it, and she drops all the stones back onto her bed.

Destruction isn’t their deal. It’s Gideon’s, which is why he’s got Dipper trapped in a glowing cage in the woods, why he’s threatening to steal his powers and shred his soul and coerce Mabel into being his prize.

Mabel can do better. She knows she can.

She takes a deeper breath, reexamines her collection. She chooses more carefully, still listening for distant sounds in the woods, watching for pulses of light. She puts on pendant after pendant, ring after ring, layers bracelets and bangles and golden bands till she’s armored.

She sweats under all the metal, feels it collect on her face, in the places where her skin is already so much redder than she wants it to be.

She taps the topaz center of the second ring on her left-hand middle finger, is back in the woods.

“Why there you are, honeybun!” Gideon cries, looking at her from afar. He’s standing right on the edge of the circle, with a fresh bandage out to wrap up a new prick in his last formerly wound-free finger, with Dipper sprawled on the ground and gasping a terrible sound, part-laugh and part-sob, “Your brother here was just tellin’ me you aren’t any kind of hellspawn after all!”

Mabel wishes she were hellish, terrifying. She wishes she’d brought the gems that shoot fire, just for show.

“I wouldn’t have guessed, but I can’t deny I’m relieved,” He continues, smile turning sheepish, “He doesn’t even look like any kind of demon himself, after all. Just plain ol’ ordinary Dipper Pines,” He scoffs, and as the circle at his feet glows brighter so do Dipper’s eyes, in flashes, bright when he opens them, though he’s got them clenched shut mostly, wincing when he rolls onto his side, “Not even a threat.”

Mabel thinks she can feel her blood boil, feels hotter than the sun overhead, feels like every piece of metal on her skin could be sizzling right now, searing.

“But it’s alright if you haven’t got any magic,” Gideon tells her, consoling, “I can carry enough for the two of us, and I can dang sure use it better.”

Mabel balls her hands to fists, feels twelve different little metal bands dig into her skin.

She tells Gideon to let her brother go.

He laughs. He steps toward her, says, “Oh darlin’ I just can’t do that.”

She _insists_ that he let Dipper go, and her voice sounds too tight, choked, because Dipper sounds choked, barely breathing inside the circle.

“I’ll consider it,” Gideon says, “If you’d consider bein’ my sugarplum.”

He smiles his most charming smile, even snaps his fingers so the lights of the circle die down, leave Dipper very still and breathing in a harsh, rattling way.

And Mabel knows better than to trust him, is sure he’ll hurt Dipper in a heartbeat, might kill him if she isn’t careful. She knows that Dipper wouldn’t want her to wager her life for his, and she knows better than to use herself as a bargaining chip.

She isn’t a pretty prize. She’s a threat.

She’s a monster, when she lets herself be. Every one of the jewels and metals wrapped around her body, each tiny shield, is a transformative thing. They’re charms to transfigure, to reshape, and though she’s never done more than change the color of her hair before, she sets them free this time, lets them work.

She gives herself horns and glowing eyes, fangs and claws and spikes that run the length of her spine, that tear holes in her tank top and feel like nothing more than dust on her back. She makes herself taller, larger, immense and incredible while Gideon shrinks before her.

She’s smoke and mirrors made real in sharp points and jarring colors, a creature more than a girl, and not one to be reckoned with. She keeps the redness of her cheeks, the hated blotches and bumps across her skin.

She demands that Gideon let her brother go.

He trembles for a moment, looking from Mabel to Dipper and back again, before bringing a foot down on the edge of the circle, breaking it with one motion.

“I-I don’t want any part of this sorcery,” He says in a horrified whisper, and flinches this time when she growls, when she shows her teeth. She roars and he screams, runs, deeper into the woods, through mud that stains his suit, through branches that stick in his hair. He stumbles out of sight, leaving behind only half a box of colored bandages and a few drawings in the dirt.

Dipper sits up, slow, careful, and Mabel comes back to herself. All the jewels feel heavier than she remembers them being, hanging off her hands, around her neck. She’s her usual size and shape, with short nails painted pink and gold, with teeth kept straight by a nightly retainer. She feels adorable, in spite of her sweat and her torn up shirt and her rebellious skin, though all that doesn’t especially matter right now.

She runs to Dipper’s side and takes his pulse, takes his hand. He seems alright, relatively speaking. Not bleeding, at least, not bruised. When he coughs to clear his throat his eyes glow like they should.

“Okay so,” He says, a little hoarse, “Being tickled in your soul? Not as funny as it sounds.”

Mabel laughs anyway, relieved. She bunches her fingers in the fabric of the back of his shirt and asks if he’s okay, really okay.

And he’s fine, “Fine enough,” He says, and winces when he starts to stand, “I think I pulled a muscle writhing around on the ground like that though.”

Mabel offers him a hand up, never quite gets it back after the fact. They walk around the remaining edges of Gideon’s circle, first studying it, committing the design to memory, than scuffing it all out just in case.

They walk back to the shack, taking their time, because it’s still hot and they’re both worn out in their own ways.

Mabel says she might have to rip holes in all her shirts, because it’s actually pretty cool and comfortable.

“Yeah,” Dipper says, but he’s not looking at her shirt, just at her face, at her eyes, “I didn’t know you could do that. The whole, shapeshifting thing.”

Neither did she, till she tried it. She thinks that she could probably use the same jewels, maybe a few less, to clear up her skin, to change a lot of things, but that she doesn’t really want to.

“That was…interesting,” Dipper says, and Mabel isn’t sure if that’s a good interesting or a bad one.

“Just interesting,” Dipper clarifies, “Kind of cool, actually. And terrifying. I mean, I didn’t see most of it from where I was but wow. You’re terrifying, you know that right?”

And Mabel grins like her teeth are still pointed and deadly.

She lets Dipper rest his head on her shoulder as they limp back through the woods, doesn’t point out that it’s easy since he’s still shorter than her. She says maybe they should prepare for things other than demons, and Dipper murmurs his agreement.

“You always seem to handle Gideon alright though,” He says, and laughs lightly, “Maybe he’ll even leave us alone now that you scared him off.”

Mabel doubts it. She thinks that Gideon is the kind of person who might love her even if she was a monster. Even if he’s afraid of her. There’s something admirable in that, she’s sure, but something sad too. She thinks that Gideon is also the kind of person who will never change himself too much for anyone, and that isn’t anything but sad.

She looks at Dipper, with his own collection of blotchy, speckled spots and knows that she’ll always be a little bit worried about how she looks, and that’s okay.

She asks if Dipper would still want to see a movie later, since it’ll be dark and air conditioned and they can get that popcorn with the cinnamon sugar they both like.

“Just not a comedy,” He says, putting a  hand gingerly over his midsection, “I think I need to not laugh…or actually, not move for like, a week. Ow.”

Mabel doesn’t make any promises about laughter, but she is willing to carry him if he wants.

He doesn’t exactly refuse.

And even though it’s the hottest day of the year, even though they’re technically too old to act like children, maybe because they’re both more shaken than they care to admit, Mabel gives her brother a piggy back ride out of the woods.

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	13. The Gift

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For the past few days there have been experiments going on in the Mystery Shack.

There are bits and pieces of the ongoing process everywhere, left on shelves and tables and across the floor, wherever Mabel happened to be when she finished one piece and took on another. They are less jewels and more random objects, and Dipper has already tripped over three of them.

First an ottoman, then a very large framed photo, then a big old vase he didn’t even know was in the shack until it got underfoot.

He’s told Mabel to clean it all up like, five times already, and she keeps swearing she will, but only in a drifty, distracted voice that implies she’s way too focused on her newest finding to listen to him. She’s got this thing she’s working on, calls them “sentiment stones,” and she’s obsessed with them in a way he hasn’t seen her hyperfocus on something other than her crush of the week in a while.

“They take in the emotion connected to physical stuff,” She told him at the start of the project, while she hot-glued one of the pale stones to the head of her favorite teddy bear, “And amplify it! Like a megaphone for your _heart_!”

And Dipper warned her that it sounded a little risky. Because amplifying emotions sounds like toying with emotions which is dangerously close to messing with minds, like mind control, and she _knows_ how he feels about that stuff.

And she’d smiled apologetically, promised it was nothing like that.

“It’s more like…being reminded of something by scent or sound. You know?”

He doesn’t know, exactly, but he trusts her.

Grunkle Stan doesn’t, apparently, or at least doesn’t want her taking any more of his stuff. He’s been hoarding all his things in his room and warning her every morning to keep her sparkly little hands off his favorite painting. He says, “Sentiment is a bunch of hooey,” but Dipper knows damn well he’s got old letters and black and white pictures and a pair of glasses that aren’t his own that he cleans when he thinks no one’s looking.

Dipper’s hiding things too though, so he has no room to talk. He just figures it’s best if Mabel keeps her magic gemstones away from, say, the journal, or his hat.

Mabel finds enough material to work with anyway. She tracks him down in the kitchen and forces a cracked mug into his hand, the side with the crack and the sliver of pale blue stone set into it facing up, so he can stare at it and focus as she says, “Do you feel anything?”

He feels frustrated, kind of anxious. That’s nothing new though. His fingertips tingle a little, almost an itch, and a small part of him wants to throw the mug.  He hands it back to Mabel instead, shrugs, looks for something for lunch.

She corners him in the bathroom when he’s brushing his teeth, hands him a rubber duck studded with tiny multicolored stones.

“How do you feel?” She asks carefully.

He looks down at the duck and contemplates it. He feels confused, mostly. Only confused, actually. What is the duck for? Why is it staring at him like that? What is she trying to achieve with all this, exactly?

She takes it back and gives it a squeak, nods like she understands some deep mystery of the universe, and all she says is, “Good.”

She drops pieces of broken stones into the garbage, tells him, “The happy ones keep breaking. They’re not strong enough,” and he can’t help but laugh because Mabel’s brand of happiness is too much for a lot of things, and apparently even a solid stone can’t hold it.

She holds onto a sweater she’s grown out of, sitting on the floor beside her bed and feeling for the stones she’s sewed into the pockets, and she looks like she might cry when Dipper comes to ask her what she’s up to.

“They definitely work,” She tells him after he’s slipped the sweater from her hands and stared her down, waiting to make sure she’s okay. He tells her she shouldn’t create things that make her sad, and she shakes her head. She says, “We all have to be sad sometimes, Dipper. Even _I_ know that.”

He thinks that’s no reason to make things sadder than they have to be, thinks that it would be nice if his sister was never sad. He thinks about taking all her sentiment stones away and hiding them because they make him uncomfortable. But that’d be wrong, so he accepts handfuls of objects, both strange and familiar, with little stones stuck in them and tells Mabel he feels, um, wistful? Uncertain? Devious?

He says he’s not good at this but she says, “No no, you’re great,” and takes notes that are mostly doodles of his face with various exaggerated expressions.

“I think I’ve almost got it,” She tells him, and stays up too late that night working on something she won’t let him see.

In the morning she deposits a gift wrapped package on his bed, stands around waiting for him to open it.

He reminds her that their birthday already passed and she says, “It’s not a birthday present, it’s a just because present.”

And he heaves a sigh, feeling unbalanced without something to give in return, but opens it anyway, pulling at the paper carefully so it all stays intact. There’s a book inside, which is promising, but it’s bright purple which is not. He flips it over, cautious, to look at the cover, and finds it as glittery and puff-paint coated as he would expect. The bubble letters read ‘To Dipper, From Mabel,” and there’s a pale pink stone cemented underneath them, in a spot that is probably meant for a photo.

He braces himself for some kind of weird, overwhelming feeling, but it never comes. He holds the book in his lap and looks at Mabel, who has perched on the edge of his bed, her eyes wide.

She’s waiting for something, and that keeps him suspicious. But the only other thing he’s feeling is kind of…happy? A little embarrassed? Basically the same way he feels whenever Mabel gives him something she made. A book is better than a sweater, at least. As skilled at knitting as she is, he’s never really had the heart to go out of the house in the bright blue sweater she sewed constellations into, or the camouflage one she insisted would be good for sneaking around.

A book is definitely more his style.

He flips it open to the first pages, finds it full of pictures. It’s a scrapbook; classic Mabel. There are pictures he remembers taking, just a few summers ago, and older ones, ones he’d forgotten all about. They’re arranged and annotated, with little reminders in pink gel pen, with stickers to hold down ragged edges.

He sees the flimsy fake IDs they used to get into a bar to question a suspect, and a letter he sent to the Gravity Falls Maximum Security Penitentiary that was returned, undelivered, citing strong language and possible demonic threats. He finds movie ticket stubs and newspaper clippings, sticky notes with plans for expeditions they never went on, and bright drawings in the margins of the pages with quotes attached, things there’s no evidence of but that Mabel is making sure get mentioned.

He goes through page after page and feels lighter for each one, more endeared to the thing binding them all together. When he presses his fingers to the cool stone set into the book’s cover he feels strangely calm, warmed. The tension in his back eases and his heart beats just a little slower, like the onset of sleep. He thinks that’s more the magic than the sentiment tied up in the scrapbook itself, but then, he doesn’t really know how this stuff works. He’s more about alternate dimensions and terrifying creatures than magic items. This thing is Mabel’s specialty, not his.

He tears up a little somewhere in the middle, completely by accident, and doesn’t even look up at Mabel as he comments that she must have gotten the happiness stones to work.

“Yup,” She says, proud, “I realized you have to mix it with something heavier so it won’t just float away or burst. Like nostalgia.”

 Nostalgia is a heavy feeling, Dipper thinks, closing the scrapbook and resting his hands on the cover, around the stone, but a nice one. Like comfort food, or a very full, hot bath.

“I’ll admit,” Mabel says, “I was mostly just using you as a guinea pig to see if this stuff would work. But I also wanted to make you something to remember our Mystery Twin days.”

He says they never stopped being the Mystery Twins, but Mabel shakes her head. She leans off the edge of his bed till she might tip over, and does, but the pendant around her neck lights up to catch her in time, leaves her floating like a cloud.

“It’s different now,” She says, but she’s smiling, and he knows what she means. It is different, _they’re_ different, not only because of the dream powers and magic gems, but because everything changes over time, eventually.

And it’s not a bad thing.

“I’m already collecting stuff for my next scrapbook,” Mabel says, and throws her hands up, spirit finger style, “Pinebase Delta 12 Part 2: The Magic Twins Era! Just don’t expect it any time soon, since we’re still in progress. Maybe when we’re like, sixty, or eighty,” She pauses thoughtfully and her hair floats around her like waves, “Do you think we’ll live to be a hundred since we’re all like, thumbing our noses at the laws of physics now? How long do people in our family even live? Oh my gosh- how old is Grunkle Stan? Like,” She cups her hands around her mouth, whispers in a scandalized tone, “A million?”

Dipper doesn’t know the answers to any of these questions, except for the last one, which is a definite no.

He doesn’t know how to initiate an awkward thank you hug either, except to put his arms out and make a vague shrugging gesture as if in invitation. It seems like the thing to do after receiving a gift.

Thankfully Mabel speaks his language, squeals and throws herself at him in response. She deems it a scrapbook worthy moment, and pulls a camera from her pocket as if she’d planned this from the start, catching Dipper with his hat off and his hair sticking up in three different directions.

He chases her out of the room like they’re both twelve again, tripping on enchanted teddy bears and picture frames and rubber ducks as he goes, and her laugh rings down the hall just the way he always remembers it sounding.

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	14. The Deal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick extra warning for blood in this chapter. No serious injuries, but if you're squicked by blood, here's your notice that there will be some ahead.

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“There’s blood everywhere,” Dipper says, in his squeakiest and most panicked voice, and Mabel would tell him to stop exaggerating, if she could.

It’s not _that_ much blood, although it probably looks pretty bad now that it’s all over her face. Head wounds bleed a lot, even tiny ones. And it is just a tiny one, after all. Maybe slightly larger than tiny. Getting hit with a rock will do that to you though. Getting caught up in a crow’s rebellion while you’re trying to strike a deal with the magpie monarchy out in the forest will do that to you.

She hadn’t realized birds could carry rocks that big, honestly.

“Just- just sit down, okay? Hold on,” Dipper ushers her through the bathroom to sit on the creaky closed lid of the toilet while he goes digging around for the first aid kit, “And don’t touch it,” He adds, when Mabel reaches up to examine the source of the dull pain in her head.

She sits with her arms folded instead, looking up into the mirror, getting an eyeful of slightly bloodied hair, and sighs. At least she can still do that.

“When is your voice going to come back?” Dipper asks, wielding a wash cloth in one hand and the first aid kit in the other, “Also- do you think you have a concussion? How do you test for that- is that the thing with the light? Let me look at your pupils.”

Mabel opens her mouth to argue and call him a dork for talking over himself, but all that comes out is a chirp. It’d be kind of funny under different circumstances, but right now it’s just annoying. Because just like she hadn’t known birds could carry, or throw, rocks that big, she hadn’t known that the pendant she was using to talk to animals could get her stuck on one language.

“Yeah I still can’t understand you,” Dipper says, and puts down the first aid kit on the edge of the sink. He takes hold of Mabel’s face in his now free hand, gently, just at the chin, and she giggles, ticklish. Even her laugh sounds chirpy. Dipper makes a face at the sound, worried, and says, “We’ll work on that later. For now just- ah….oh, here, just look in my eyes, okay?”

Mabel can do that. She stares like they’re having a contest, eyes wide, smiling at her brother’s concern, and keeps on staring as his eyes light up, glowing blue and bright enough to make her want to wince.

“Okay…” Dipper says, unsure. The glow fades from his eyes, leaves them warm and familiar, still worried worried worried but a little less so, “Your pupils are dilating the right way so…so that means no concussion. I think,” He turns her head slightly, like he’s making sure, and when she crosses her eyes at him he finally cracks a smile, “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you’re not concussed.”

Mabel opens her mouth to say that ‘concussed’ is a funny word, but her own words come out like birdsong.

“Um, yeah, whatever that was,” Dipper says vaguely, and reaches back over the sink to switch on the hot water, running the washcloth in his hand under it. He brings it back warm and damp and presses it to the side of Mabel’s face, where the blood is making her look so much worse off than she really is. He wipes her face clean and she interrupts for only a moment, adjusting her headband so her hair is out of the way. Dipper tries to scold her for moving but she chirps at him, just as firm.

She’s trying to say that he shouldn’t worry because she’s fine, and also that he’s banged up too, you know, so maybe he should try taking care of his own injuries. There’s a nasty scratch on his cheek, for instance, which she points out physically, to get the point across.

“What?” Dipper says, and moves his hand to his own face, tapping his fingers against the slight swell of blood, “Oh. I didn’t notice.”

Probably because he didn’t look in the mirror. Probably because he’s been avoiding mirrors lately. It’s this weird thing, and not one of the totally irrational but still kind of understandable types of things that Dipper usually does. Mabel _definitely_ understands this one, because she’s had trouble with mirrors in the past, and more importantly, Dipper is being followed in them.

They both are, sort of, she guesses, but it’s definitely Dipper that he’s after. Bill, that is. Who else would be so intent on talking to her brother from across dimensions?

The mirrors are a recent development, and not one that Mabel is happy about. She always assumed Bill Cipher would be watching them, as promised, and for years Dipper has been looking over his shoulder, suspicious of any vaguely triangular shadow.

Dipper has said, “He’s _always_ around,” quiet, nervous, but Mabel thinks that’s not entirely true. She figures only half of the shapes her brother has seen out of the corner of his eye have actually been Bill. She knows the mind can play tricks, especially when someone is already overtired or really anxious or prone to thinking the worst will happen.

Dipper is usually all of those things.

But these last few times, when Dipper has jumped back from panes of glass and reflecting pools, Mabel knows it really has been Bill. She’s heard his irritating laugh, had it ringing in her ears long after he was gone.

“Why mirrors?” Dipper had whined, at the point when he was still afraid that the demon would jump right out of the glass and turn things upside down or turn _him_ inside out.

Because he wanted to get Dipper alone, Mabel guessed. Because Bill only showed up alongside Dipper’s reflection, only spoke to him when everyone else was out of ear shot. He appeared in the glass doors of the frozen food section in the grocery store, and in the rippling water of the lake, and in the screen of the television when it was shut off and reflecting the room in darker tones.

Mabel had caught him, twice so far, harassing her brother, frightening him, but never threatening him. Bill Cipher is, these days, more of a nuisance than the living nightmare he’d once been.

“He’s trying to make a deal,” Dipper told her, after the fifth or so time, less afraid and more annoyed, “He wants his powers back.”

And Mabel had laughed, because of course that wasn’t going to happen. She had pat Dipper on the shoulder and told him not to worry over some stupid triangle.

“Anyway,” Dipper says, crouched on the floor of the bathroom and dabbing at the cut on Mabel’s forehead, “Maybe it isn’t actually _that_ much blood…but you definitely need an antiseptic. And maybe one of those like, butterfly bandages? Or, hmm…”

Mabel looks at the scratch on his cheek that’s going ignored. She looks at his hat, which may have actually saved him from the worst of the rock dropping. She looks up and to the left, and chirps in surprise, and Dipper follows her gaze, turning around to face the mirror.

“Ughh, not you again,” He groans, and it’s Bill’s laugh that answers him.

“Looking a little worse for wear there, Pine Tree,” the demon says, smug, and Mabel chirps at him angrily. His eye swivels down to her, glows slightly as he says, “Oh, and Shooting Star too! Didn’t see you there. Nice voice, by the way. Though I gotta admit, the old one was a charmer.”

“What do you want, Bill?” Dipper asks, sounding so bored, so….so…the _opposite_ of intimidated, Mabel wants to applaud. She does, in fact, and he smiles a little lopsidedly at the gesture.

“Same thing I’ve been after for weeks, kid,” the demon says, and the color fades from the room a little, closes the three of them in like bright pinpoints on a map, “A deal.”

Dipper scrunches his face in confusion, looking over his own reflection to stare at the demon in their mirror. He flips a hand in Mabel’s direction, as if presenting her, and says, “Um…”

It takes her a second to realize he’s implying that she shouldn’t be there, and she punches him in the arm for suggesting anything of the sort. He cries out a little louder than she’d expect, and she instantly regrets the hit. He’s probably already got a bird-related bruise there, and she just made it worse.

In the mirror, Bill shrugs, “Your sister’s never too far away,” He says, “If I keep waiting for her to take off, we’re never gonna get a chance to talk. You two are practically joined at the hip, you know?”

Mabel clasps a hand to her hip as if to hide it, protect it, and when she looks at Dipper she finds him doing the same on the opposite side. She nudges him, chirps what’s supposed to be ‘twins,’ but he isn’t really listening.

“I already told you I’m not interested,” Dipper says, frowning his frowniest face, “No more deals.”

Mabel squirms a little, pulling her feet up to sit cross legged. There’s a pretty decent scrape on her knee, one she doesn’t think Dipper had noticed yet, and hopefully won’t. She tweets once to voice her approval of Dipper’s steadfast refusal to bend to demon whims, and then again, telling Bill to go away already.

Dipper understands that much, at least. He nods along to her matching frustrated expression, telling Bill, “We’re kind of busy right now. Maybe you could save the low-grade harassment for another time? Or never?”

“Never’s not a good time for me,” Bill says, leaning against one side of the mirror like it’s a physical wall and not just a convenient border between wherever he exists and their bathroom.

Dipper turns his back on the mirror then, taking the first aid kit with him. He goes through it to find the antiseptic ointment, and doles some out despite Mabel’s twittering insistence that she can do it herself, “That’s a shame, because never is great for me,” He frowns harder, like he’s trying hard to ignore something, and Mabel thinks it won’t last for long. Sure enough, as soon as he’s smeared the weird sticky antiseptic gel over the cut on her forehead, Dipper glances back at the mirror, asking, “Why do you keep coming around anyway?”

Bill says nothing, just holds his hands up so the letters D E A L appear between them, flashing like a neon sign.

“But why _here_? Don’t you have a dreamscape to inhabit or whatever?”

Mabel chirps that Bill is probably afraid to talk to Dipper in the dreamscape, since he’s getting so good with dream stuff now, and smiles wide as she says it. Dipper raises an eyebrow, clearly confused, but it’s Bill’s face that she watches. His single eye narrows, just slightly, and the glow of his body seems to pulse.

“But it’s more fun sneaking up on you,” Bill argues, looking quickly back to Dipper as if Mabel hadn’t said anything at all, “You make the most hilarious faces when you think you’re inches from death, lemme tell you.”

“I don’t think I’m inches from death,” Dipper grumbles, and turns his attention back to Mabel, looking her over as if for a distraction. There’s a tree bark scrape across her knuckles he wants to examine more closely, but Mabel steals her hand away when he tries to grab it. She takes up the washcloth he’s abandoned instead, grabbing his face not quite as gently as he held hers, and dabs at the blood on his cheek.

“Oh, uh, that’s probably not sanitary,” He tells her, but makes no move to pull away.

“Well aren’t you two just the picture of sibling bonding,” Bill says, mocking, and Mabel chirps a string of song that makes him laugh, high and nasal, “Oh boy,” He says when she’s done, looking at Dipper, not at her, which makes her that much angrier, “Your sister’s got a real way with words there, Pine Tree. That’s a few coins in the swear jar, for sure.”

“I already told you to get lost,” Dipper snaps, and there’s color in his cheeks, though Mabel isn’t sure why. She puts her hands in her lap instead of up in his face, in case he’s embarrassed to have his sister looking after him while his kind of mortal enemy is watching, but that doesn’t seem to help.

“And I told _you_ I want those powers you borrowed back,” Bill says, cheerful, frighteningly cheerful, and looks down at his hand to casually examine the spot where his fingernails would be if he had any, “Told you about fifteen times already, if I remember correctly.”

Mabel and Dipper snort derisively in unison, but it’s Dipper who responds, “I didn’t borrow them, I stole them.”

Bill doesn’t flinch, but Mabel chirps a laugh and _then_ he does, shooting her the quickest, most furious sort of look, “Sure you did, kid,” He says after a moment, “But hey- ” He starts to add, and clears his throat when it seems like the two of them are ignoring him.

“We’re ignoring you,” Dipper clarifies, and Mabel gigglechirps, taking the colorful bandage he offers her and sticking it to his face instead, sort of approximately over the scratch on his cheek.

Bill looks definitely angry in the mirror, floating over Dipper’s reflection’s head and seeming like he very much wants to be floating over _actual_ Dipper’s head instead.

Mabel tries to ask if he can’t get out of the mirror to where they are, directing the question to her brother rather than Bill, but she doesn’t get an answer either way. Bill ignores her and Dipper shrugs helplessly. She thinks about pulling some charades style maneuvers to get the idea across, but Dipper’s got a hold of her hand again and is insisting on sanitizing her cuts.

“That’s not a smart move, kid,” Bill insists, and it’s almost but not quite a threat, “I’m really just trying to help _you_ out here, you know. An offer to take those powers back without a fuss is the best thing you can hope for.”

Dipper glances back over his shoulder, curious, and Mabel could smack him for being so stupidly inquisitive all the darn time. He walks into these things, really he does.

“I highly doubt that,” He says, and Mabel nods, tweets her agreement.

“How long are you going to keep this up?” Bill asks, like he’s not the one lingering around and getting on peoples nerves, “It’s been, what, ten years you’ve been playing around like you know how to handle a little power? Twenty?”

“Try three,” Dipper corrects, and Bill shrugs, “And I’m handling it pretty well, actually.”

Mabel chirps to cheer him on, makes a face at Bill in the mirror for good measure.

“Sure you are,” Bill laughs, which makes Dipper’s face go kind of pink again, and this time Mabel puts her hand over his, because she’s pretty sure she’s not the source of any of his embarrassment, “And your plan is…what? To keep fumbling around with power you can’t control in a world you don’t understand until everything just clicks into place?”

Mabel chirps. That’s how life always works, is what she’s trying to say, with or without magic and demon powers. Bill shrugs at her though, speaks to Dipper again, frustratingly.

“I’ll let you in on a secret kid, for free, no deal required,” He says, and speaks behind his hand as if being discreet, “It’s never gonna click.”

Dipper looks _awfully_ pink in the face now, and Mabel holds his hand tighter to tell him, without even a word or a birdsong, that Bill is full of it and he should know better.

He does know better, probably.

“You know what I think?” Dipper says, turning to face the mirror fully, so his own eyes glow bright in the reflection, glaring, “I think you must need these powers back pretty badly if you’re bothering me about them this much.”

Bill shrugs, noncommittal. He sits lower in the mirror’s frame, so his eye lines up with one of Dipper’s own, and the look of it makes Mabel uncomfortable.

“What you’ve got is just a part, kid,” Bill says, “Don’t forget that,” One of the blocks that make up his face flickers out as he speaks, becoming a temporary blank, black space, “I can get along fine without it.”

Mabel doesn’t doubt it. Dipper’s powers _are_ pretty limited, honestly. He’s gotten better at teleportation, and bending reality, and he can make his way around a dream or two, but nothing he’s capable of exactly screams all powerful dream demon. Because he’s not one, probably. He’s just Dipper. Dipper plus, she thinks, Dipper with a little extra. Dipper with blue fire that doesn’t hurt, and glowing eyes, and a tendency to make things float without noticing.

“Good then,” Dipper says, “Then you can keep getting along fine without it. Now if you could leave- actually, if both of you could leave, I think I’ve got a bruised rib I should be looking at-“

He stands up, and Mabel stands with him. She volunteers to check his bones for him in a series of chirps, and Bill laughs behind them, stubbornly refusing to leave.

“You can’t even fix your sister’s voice,” He says, and laughs again, drowning out Mabel’s insistence that it isn’t Dipper’s job to fix anything. Her birdvoice is her own doing, and she’ll take care of it herself.

“It’ll wear off,” Dipper says, though he doesn’t sound sure.

“I’m just curious,” Bill says, sounding so much more smug than he ought to for a guy maybe-trapped in a mirror, “Have you really wrecked anything yet? Torn anybody in two? Blown anyone up?”

“No!” Dipper says, horrified, and Mabel chirps louder, louder, trying to tell him to quit this conversation while he’s ahead, but he isn’t listening, can’t understand.

“It’s only a matter of time,” Bill warns, tapping his wrist so an oversized watch appears, ticking loudly, “That’s the problem with jamming powers that don’t belong to you into such a flimsy container,” He gestures at Dipper, from head to toe, “They backfire eventually.”

“That’s not true,” Dipper says, and he sounds even less sure.

“ ‘Fraid so,” Bill says, “These kind of things get awfully unstable with corporeal types like yourself. Makes life pretty difficult, I’d imagine.”

Mabel squawks that Dipper is doing just fine, and this time Bill looks right at her, speaks slow and careful as he says, “But for how long?”

Mabel chirps a blue streak, tells Bill he should get out of their mirror already and leave her brother alone. She says Dipper’s got a handle on his powers, and nothing has gone wrong, and nothing ever _will_ go wrong because she’s got him decked out in enough protection to save a planet, all in the form of one pendant.

Which is maybe not the best thing to tell a demon, but Bill only looks vaguely curious at the notion. He asks, in the most honestly interested way, “And what if it’s somebody else who gets hurt?”

Mabel holds her injured hand to her chest, pressing her fingers to the chain around her own neck, the one that’s stuck her with birdsong for speech, that’ll do nothing at all if her brother accidentally tilts reality and she gets caught in the middle of it.

She says, in her sternest tweet, that it won’t happen.

“How’s Pine Tree supposed to have a normal life?” Bill asks her, and it’s Dipper’s questioning, ‘Um,’ that goes ignored now, “You know, white picket fence and all,” Bill says, drawing a house shape in the air so that one appears beside him, “Wife and two point five kids?”

Mabel looks away, because she doesn’t want to see what Bill’s representation of two point five kids looks like. Beside her, Dipper says, “I don’t really want that though,” but Bill hardly looks at him.

“I like you Shooting Star,” He says, “And I mean that.”

She believes him.

“So I’m telling you it’s for your own good if your brother here gives up the magic act.”

Now that she doesn’t believe.

“Hey,” Dipper says, but neither of them look at him. Mabel is staring down the demon in their mirror, chirping a reminder that Bill has underestimated them before, that it’s cost him a deal with Gideon and a journal and now some portion of his powers.

“You wanna talk about underestimating-“ Bill begins to say, but Dipper interrupts him.

“Hey!” He says, louder than before. He’s _very_ pink in the face now. Mabel let go of his hand some time ago, when she was chirping up a storm, and now he’s got that hand balled into a fist.

“Do you mind, Pine Tree?” Bill asks in a sarcastic drawl, “This is between me and your flighty sister, here.”

Dipper punches the mirror.

There’s a moment where everyone looks surprised; Bill, because the glass he’s situated in has just cracked, Mabel because she’s never seen Dipper hit something like that, and Dipper himself because he’s not usually the kind of guy to hit stuff like that.

The crack that’s left after Dipper pulls his hand away spiderwebs fast, shooting through the rest of the mirror with a high pitched crack. All of the glass stays in place, except for a few tiny pieces that come away in the center, where Bill’s eye should be, but he’s fading fast.

“Temper, temper,” The demon says with a laugh like he’s joking, but Mabel is certain he looked nervous. He disappears in a flash of light, leaving the mirror empty except for two reflections.

Mabel turns to her brother, in the mirror and in the quiet of the bathroom, and says his name, softly, and it’s not birdsong at all. She says it again, louder, excited, and shouts it just because she can, because she can’t believe he just _did_ that and Grunkle Stan is going to be _so_ mad but it was still _so_ cool and oh- oh he’s bleeding.

“It’s not that much blood,” Dipper says, but he’s looking down at his hand like it doesn’t belong to him, and really it kind of _is_ a lot of blood.

There’s blood everywhere, Mabel tells him, although this is an exaggeration. It’s just on his hand, and a little on the mirror where he hit it. There’s no glass shards in his hand, at least, when she inspects the skin more closely. She tells him to sit down and grabs the first aid kid, picking up where he left off.

He lets her clean his hand, with a new washcloth this time, and put little kitten patterned bandages over the cuts. He sits with her while she puts matching ones of her own hand, and smiles when she holds her bandaged hand up against his, not quite a fist-bump.

“Twins,” He says, and she makes a non-birdy chirping noise to agree.

They head downstairs together, to tell Grunkle Stan the bad news about the monster who definitely wasn’t Dipper who broke the bathroom mirror, and to keep the news about Bill to themselves, as something to avoid talking about for a little while longer.

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	15. The Shop

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Stan Pines is going to a pawn shop with his grandniece and nephew on the premise that he’s on the lookout for a new exhibit for the shack. That’s the story he gave them when he first asked where the two of them were sneaking off to and offered a ride that was met with suspicious looks. It’s the story he’s sticking with.

And he isn’t completely lying. He really does want to look for something interesting to add to the “haunted” trunk that rattles and growls whenever he remembers to turn on the motor inside it. Mostly though, he just wants to spy on the kids.

Because while he tends to keep out of their business, due both to his dislike of teenagers (which they officially are now, ugh,) and their teenaged garbage, and to the fact that they’re good at handling themselves when it comes to supernatural stuff, he still likes to keep tabs.

Honestly at this point the teenaged garbage is a hell of a lot scarier than any of the supernatural stuff. Sweaty and awkward never stopped being constants in Dipper’s life, and Mabel has taken to calling herself “practically a grown woman” which Stan knows is code for “I think I can do literally whatever I want and no one can stop me.”

He’s pretty sure no one’s been able to stop Mabel from doing whatever she wants before anyway, but that’s neither here nor there. Her newfound sense of independence and imagined indestructability paired with Dipper’s impressively bad luck puts the two of them at risk for getting into more trouble than ever before.

Or maybe Stan is just noticing that the two of them are getting older, which means _he’s_ getting older, which means he’s got to keep an eye on them while he can.

He can practically hear a hundred different aging action heroes echoing the same clichéd sentiment in his head; _I’m getting too old for this shit_.

“And you’re sure this is the one you heard about?” Dipper asks, voice lowered like he doesn’t want someone, maybe Stan, to overhear. They’re rounding the corner in an unfamiliar town, headed to a shady looking shop, and he sounds uncertain.

“Positive,” Mabel answers, “I’ve got an informant in Bridgewood who swears it’s the right piece, and I’m pretty sure he’s not even capable of lying, _so_ …”

Stan gives her an encouraging pat on the shoulder, an ‘atta girl’ for figuring her way around the sleazy underbelly of the local magical items trade so quick. He might not be thrilled about her collection of supernatural trinkets, but he’s sure as hell proud of her for, how should we say, “acquiring” them so successfully.

Dipper scoffs from Mabel’s side, “I see how it is,” He says, frowning, “Mabel _has_ an informant and she’s the golden child. I _am_ an informant and I get grounded.”

“It’s different with federal agents, Dipper,” Mabel reminds him, gently, and Stan nods his approval.

Dipper isn’t satisfied with that answer though, keeps on scowling as the three of them file into the pawn shop through a set of glass doors that chime irritatingly when they’re opened.

And here, Stan keeps his distance. He tells the kids- hardly kids anymore- he’s going to go look at the fur coats they’re keeping well out of customer reach, and the two of them ‘uh huh’ in unison.

Stan looks at the coats. He looks at a godawful ugly pair of boots too, and a belt with a buckle that looks like some kind of knockoff prizefighter deal, but while he looks he listens. He hears the kids whispering about whether or not they’d be able to swipe the thing they’re looking for right out of the case, whether it’s in there at all, and, when a woman with heavy eyeliner and a long, thin face comes out from the back room to meet them, hears them greet her as sweet and polite as anything.

Little con artists, the pair of them. Stan could almost tear up over it.

“Good afternoon, miss,” Mabel says, and Stan can hear the smile in her voice.

She always lays it on a little thick but hey, most folks find her charming. She _is_ charming, all bright and sunshiney and cute as the dickens. Pretty too, which means there’s plenty of people these days starting to eye her up in that _interested_ fashion, a few dumb enough to get awfully close, and yeah, he may have threatened to break a few kneecaps, even after she told him she was perfectly capable of breaking kneecaps herself and to keep his old fashioned overprotective patriarchal stuff to himself.

Can’t teach an old man new feminism though, can you?

“We’re looking for something- or, well, we heard you might have something we’re interested in,” Dipper explains, and now he, he sounds like a boy scout. A nervous one.

Stan shrugs this off, since people seem to find _that_ charming too, though he’s not sure why. Dipper’s getting to the age where folks are starting to pay attention to him instead of just put up with him; judgy adults who grudgingly trust him since he looks like he won’t cause trouble, flirtatious teen dirtbags his own age who smile when he stutters, who are damn near as bad as the ones making eyes at his sister. Stan can’t quite bring himself to threaten any violence there, double standard and all, though to be fair he’s got it on good authority that Mabel clocked the last person to get a little too handsy with her brother, which is heartening.

Stan thinks he wouldn’t trade anything to go through the mess that is puberty again, not even to avoid the pain in his joints or the thicker and thicker lenses he’s had to get put in his glasses over the years. He’ll take being a stubborn achey old man over raging hormones any day.

The back of his neck prickles suddenly with the unease of being watched. When he turns around to look the shopkeeper is gesturing toward him. Mabel shrugs and Dipper says, “He’s with us,” although he doesn’t sound happy about it. Stan makes a mental note to give him crap for it later.

“You’re the ones looking for the spark stone,” The shopkeeper says, her voice flat, and Stan inspects a vintage radio closely, looking busy, “I thought you’d be taller.”

Stan glances toward the counter, sees Dipper stand up straighter, his shoulders stiff. He sees Mabel lean forward, probably batting her eyelashes, hears her say, “So you’re interested in selling it, right?”

The shopkeeper scoffs. She says, “To a serious buyer. Not to children.”

“Hey-“ Dipper starts to argue, but Mabel interrupts him, smooth as anything, saying, “We’re hardly _children_.”

“How old are you, girl?” The shopkeeper asks. Stan doesn’t like her tone.

“It’s not polite to ask a lady her age,” Mabel answers, haughty, and Stan turns back around to the radio to hide his smirking.

“I don’t appreciate you wasting my time,” The shopkeeper says, getting snippy.

It’s Dipper that speaks up this time, as close to authoritative as Stan’s ever heard him sound, “No one’s time is being wasted if we can afford the thing. How much is it?”

The shopkeeper hums a thoughtful sound, scrutinizing. To Stan’s ear it sounds like she’s gearing up to a price tag that’s less dollars and cents and more souls and still beating hearts, but hey, maybe he’s being cynical. Maybe this lady is just your run of the mill magical items dealing scumbag.

Who is he kidding? There’s nothing run of the mill about that.

“I’ve heard _rumors_ ,” The shopkeeper says, drawing the last word out to a near-hiss, “About a pair of imps with matching faces who play with magic that doesn’t belong to them.”

Stan balls his hands to fists, thinking about how Gravity Falls isn’t the only town in the world full of weird dangerous things, thinking about much time it’ll take him to cross the room, to very rudely punch a woman in the face.

“Wow,” Mabel says, sounding honestly surprised, “Word travels.”

Dipper says, “Mabel, shh!” As if that’ll do them any good.

“I’ve heard rumors,” The shopkeeper continues, “About the brightest light- the one that shone out of the forest years and years ago,” And at this Stan looks back at her. He narrows his eyes and she smiles, her mouth looking too large for her face, the teeth that show between her lips too small and pointed.

“We wouldn’t know anything about that,” Mabel says, “Since we’re _children_ and all.”

“And imps, apparently,” Dipper adds, and Stan can picture his sour expression without even seeing his face.

“Imps carrying stolen goods,” The shopkeeper says, placing a hand on the countertop between them. Her nails are long and curved, claws really, “Around their necks and in their veins.”

Dipper swallows audibly. Stan clears his throat, but no one turns to look at him.

“One is easier to reach than the other,” The shopkeeper says, smiling wide enough to show all her pointed teeth and another few rows set behind them, “But both would go for a decent price.”

And even though Mabel’s hands are already glowing with the rings Stan doesn’t trust, even though Dipper has stepped into a fighting stance Stan didn’t think he was capable of, even though Stan himself is past the point of being too damn old for this shit, he picks up the vintage radio from the shelf in front of him and chucks it across the room, hitting the shopkeeper squarely in the head before she can so much as raise a claw.

She stumbles, hissing. When she comes back up it’s with a head full of more teeth than Stan has ever seen, with a cry that’s got to be prehistoric, and the kids are going for the door before Stan can even yell at them to get out.

Stan hopes his back won’t go out as he jumps the counter, hopes he won’t get a fistful of teeth when he lands a punch.

It’s a struggle from there, a mess of breaking glass and slashing claws. He loses his hat, finds it again, loses some blood and doesn’t get it back. He’s pinned under a sharp, screaming shopkeeper with his chest aching in a way that probably isn’t healthy, when two voices rise above it all, shouting outside his peripheral.

“Mabel- spell?”

“Got it, Dip. Gonna shift?”

“On it.”

It’s all Greek to Stan, but when Mabel addresses him next, it’s in familiar language.

“Stan, punch!”

Punching is one of his strengths. His only strength, possibly. He hits the toothy shopkeeper with his best left hook and sends a few of those teeth flying. The monster rears back just as the room goes grey, as it all tilts enough to make Stan’s head spin. Something silver flies overhead, lands in the shopkeeper’s open mouth, and as a pale blue light envelops her, Stan finds himself displaced, suddenly on the opposite side of the room beside the kids, still sprawled on the floor.

Was that teleportation? Or was Dipper messing with planes of existence again? He can’t tell one trick from the next half the time. He has _no_ idea what Mabel’s silver thing did, except that the shopkeeper seems frozen in place, head tipped back in a silent shriek.

“Nice one,” He hears Dipper say, and when he turns around to look at the two of them the unnatural glow is fading from the kid’s eyes. The color creeps back into the room just as all the pain is settling into Stan’s muscles, and as stubborn and proud and suspicious as he is, he’s already half-tempted to ask the brats to carry him home with some of their magic nonsense.

“Temporary binding spell,” Mabel says, a little smug, then adds, hurriedly, “Very temporary, we should probably leave.”

Dipper gives Stan a hand up and neither of them acknowledge it. The three of them exit through the shop door with the annoying little chime and walk back down the street casually, like they aren’t leaving the scene of a supernatural throw down, while Mabel sighs her regret at not being able to pocket anything sparkly.

“Maybe next time we don’t listen to informants who can’t lie,” Dipper says, “Because honestly- that probably just makes them trickier.”

Mabel waves a hand at him, dismissive, but Stan admits he makes a good point.

“Are you alright, Grunkle Stan?” Dipper asks then, possibly because he’s concerned for his health but more likely because having Stan agree with him is not a normal thing.

Stan says he’s fine, just that he’s going to have to replace all his body parts probably.

“Ooo, I bet I could make you some _really_ cool replacement limbs,” Mabel offers, “I just need some plastic and some shock absorbers and some glitter and some twice-blessed iron ore-” She ticks these things off on her fingers, smiling brightly till Stan gives her a stern ‘no’ and she pouts.

“Well can I at least drive us home?” She offers instead.

Stan and Dipper refuse in unison, which is uncomfortable to say the least _._

As they all climb into Stan’s car to start the trip back to familiar territory, Mabel asks her brother, “Do you really think anybody would want to buy your blood?” and Dipper looks like he might be sick.

Stan reminds him to throw up out the window if he has to, not on the floor, and reminds them both that he’s too old to be doing this shit.

“You hardly look a day over two hundred,” Mabel says sweetly, and Stan can’t tell if she’s joking or not.

“No one asked you to come with us,” Dipper mutters, but he doesn’t sound _totally_ unhappy about it.

Stan makes a mental note to give him crap for it later anyway, but not now. For now they’re talking about theoretical blood markets and anti-aging secrets and that time Stan got lost in the mountains with only a three-legged dog for company- what, he never told them about that? It’s a funny story actually.

He tells it to them on the ride home, while Dipper’s stomach settles and Mabel texts someone who’s supposedly her “hot date” for the night. He keeps an eye on the two of them in the rear view mirror, knowing damn well there’s no need because they’re a couple of garbage teenagers and not little kids.

They’re getting too old for this, for him to be keeping tabs on them, but that’s not going to stop him from trying.

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	16. The Walk

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At least for the summers, at least for the time that they spend in Gravity Falls, Mabel and Dipper don’t spend much time apart. They’re a team after all, and teams (especially teams of only two,) tend to stick together. There are mysteries to understand and monsters to fight and entire pizzas to eat while Grunkle Stan looks on and mutters about damn kids and their damn unnatural appetites.

There’s a lot to do together. But that doesn’t mean they don’t spend time apart too. Everyone needs time alone, even social butterflies like Mabel, and Dipper especially needs a moment here and there spent in solitude. Maybe more like an hour here and there. Or an entire day.

So they give each other space. Dipper sits cross-legged in bed with a sea of books around him, or up on the roof mentally connecting the stars, his gaze always pulling subconsciously toward the set that match the mark across his forehead. Mabel goes for walks.

Because the time it takes to walk from a Mystery Shack packed with family and tourists to anywhere else in town is precisely enough time alone for Mabel. Ten minutes where it’s just her and the trees, where the only sound besides the wind and the rustle of fur or feathers is her own voice as she whistles, sings to herself, is perfect. More than that and she’d start to get bored.

There’s almost always someone to meet with though. If it isn’t a passing pixie than it’s a talking squirrel, a disembodied hand, a cherubim who doesn’t look _anything_ like what they paint onto decorative teapots and greeting cards for grandmothers but is actually really, really cool and good at setting things on fire.

She thinks sometimes, as she chats up forest spirits over herbal tea and climbs down into dry riverbeds to check in with the rock creatures that live there, that Dipper would want to know more about these things. She tells him about most of the creatures she meets, of course, and takes selfies with them when they permit it, so there’s photographic evidence. But she isn’t exactly doing investigative reporting out here. That’s his deal though, not hers. Dipper makes charts and theories, Mabel just makes friends.

She explains this to a very nice dragon who’s been living in an abandoned well deep in the forest while he braids her hair with his thin, tapered claws.

“Well, Dipper,” She says, “He’s just different than me. And that’s not a bad thing. We’ve got the good kind of different going on, where we complement each other.”

The dragon nods, humming his understanding, and ties off Mabel’s hair with the slimmest, shiniest golden thread she’s ever seen. He turns around, thin body twisting like a snake, and Mabel turns with him, facing his wingless back. She works her fingers through the fine hair of his mane, untangling the multicolored strands before she separates it to sections. It’ll take a few braids to get it all sorted out, but she thinks the end result will be cute.

“It took me a while to figure out,” She continues, “When we were little I just wanted him to be more like me so I could understand him better, and he was sort of the same way about me. But then I realized that us being different is what makes it so cool for us to hang out together, you know? We bring different things to the table.”

“Sounds a bit like myself and my winged cousins,” The dragon, who has never given her his name, says, turning his head just enough to keep from disturbing Mabel’s braiding, “I used to resent them for flying while I was here on the ground. But there is just as much to see here as in the sky. Whenever we get together we have new stories to tell one another from the tunnels and clouds.”

“Exactly,” Mabel says, though she thinks it’s a little different. She’s never resented Dipper, not as far as she can remember. She _hopes_ he hasn’t resented her, though she is, she supposes, more prone to flight. She asks the dragon to tell her more about the tunnels while she braids his mane, tying each section off with a shimmering pearlescent bead for decoration. She listens eagerly, gasping at scandalous gossip and laughing at strange dragon jokes, and when she’s all done she says, “Those flying dragons are gonna be _soooooo_ _jealoouuus_.”

She takes the ten minute walk from the deepest, darkest center of the forest out to the lake, prying off her shoes when the ground beneath her feet shifts from sprouting grass and fallen pine needles to sandy wet soil. She tiptoes to the quietest side of the lake, where the water is shallow for only a foot or so before the ground gives way to a sudden, dangerous drop into deep, deep water. It’s a place the local kids know well enough to stay away from, one that’s too far out of the way for tourists who are only here to rent rowboats and canoes.

She throws a small rock into the water with a satisfying splash and waits, waits, and soon a head of slick black hair rises out of the water, followed by an equally inky dark pair of eyes.

Humans aren’t the only ones who vacation in Gravity Falls. Mabel’s met up with this selkie a few times while they’re here with their friends for the summer, and she’s got that funny twisty turny tumbly feeling in her stomach that makes her think _this_ might be her great summer romance. One of them, anyway.

She sits at the edge of the water, with her feet submerged and her shorts getting wet from the damp ground, and giggles into the sleeves of her sweater when webbed fingers brush her ankles, flirtation disguised as curiosity.

“Come off it,” Mabel says, but she’s laughing delightedly all the while, “Don’t act like you don’t have legs, Avi, I’ve _seen_ them.”

Avi is the selkie’s name. It’s short for something long and Latin that Dipper could probably break down and explain, if Mabel asked, but she hasn’t actually mentioned meeting anyone with a secret seal skin to Dipper. Yet.

“Not legs like this,” Avi says, and smiles bright, charming, before hiding their face halfway beneath the surface of the water, “You should come back tonight,” They tell Mabel, half the words lost to bubbles, but she gets the idea, “So I can come up and sit with you and no one will look at me funny.”

“Or I could just bring you a robe,” Mabel suggests. Selkies have a tendency to be naked a lot. She wonders if this is a sea creature thing since, on reflection, she’s realized that Mermando never wore more than just jewelry, even in public.

“Or you could come in here with me,” Avi says, smiling sly, and Mabel grins because she’s _definitely_ got a date. That is totally a date. A lake date. She’ll bring flowers. She’ll _expect_ flowers.

She slips her feet out of the water with a wink and a promise to return when the sun sets.

She walks barefoot into the forest, till the prickliness of the ground drives her to put her shoes back on. Ten minutes of footfall and birdsong calm her fluttering heartbeat, but it doesn’t take the color from her cheeks. She slips between tree trunks like she’s walking the runway, like she’s on stage. She thinks when she gets back home she’ll tell Dipper what she heard from the dragon, but won’t say anything about the selkie. He’s never as excited as she is about the possibility of summer love.

A baby troll wandering around the trees breaks her out of her romantic distraction. She’s nearly as tall as Mabel and twice as wide across, but she’s got a tiny little voice and when she cries that she can’t find her mom, Mabel’s heart breaks right in two. The Mystery Shack can wait- she’s got a family reunion to manage.

She sits with the little troll, who at first says she isn’t supposed to talk to strangers but, since she hasn’t got anyone else to help her and since she could just beat Mabel up if she turned out to be a bad guy, eventually admits that she’s lost and scared. Mabel holds her greenish hand and promises to wait with her until her mom shows up.

“The forest is easy to get lost in,” Mabel tells her, “I get lost all the time!”

“Really?” The troll sniffles. She rubs at her eyes with her free hand, pouting around a large set of tusks.

“Really,” Mabel says, “Just last week I got all turned around taking a shortcut and wandered around for- pfff….probably like a million hours? If my brother didn’t come out looking for me I’d have been in one heck of a pickle.”

The troll girl wrinkles her nose and Mabel isn’t sure if it’s at the mention of pickles or brothers. Both are kind of weird and smell funny.

“But how’d he find you?” She asks, holding Mabel’s hand a little tighter, almost too tight. Trolls are strong. Ow.

“Oh, well…” Mabel considers. She isn’t sure, actually. It was luck, probably. The whole deal with her getting lost in the first place was mostly because the section of trees she was in kept rearranging themselves. She’s usually way better about finding her way home, “We’re just really good at finding each other. Maybe it’s because we’re twins.”

“Twins?”

Mabel doesn’t think she has it in her to explain the way twins happen. That’s way too close to explaining where babies come from in the first place and she’s isn’t even sure it works the same way for trolls, so it’s best to keep off that topic.

“It’s a human thing, maybe,” She says, shrugging it off. She thinks maybe it’s actually not so much a human thing or even a twin thing as the fact that Dipper can light up the little summoning circle hidden under her hair to pinpoint her location, so long as there’s no magical interference. That definitely helps.

It’s just starting to get dark when the mother troll finds them. Mabel has learned the little troll’s favorite colors and foods and fairytales, which are a little different than the kind she remembers hearing when she was a little kid, and they’re both sufficiently covered in scratch and sniff stickers.

The mother troll is about fifteen feet tall so it’s easy to see her coming. It’s easy to hear her too, since she bellows loud enough to shake the treetops while she’s looking for her baby.

Mabel tears up a little when the two run into each other’s arms, and only cringes a tiny bit when the mother troll curls her lip over her tusks aggressively, threatening first and asking questions later.

“She helped me, mama,” The little troll squeaks, and at that her mom relaxes, giving Mabel a curious sniff instead of a deadly bite.

“You smell like strong magic,” She says, hefting her baby up on to one hip, “And oranges.”

“Guilty as charged, ma’am.”

They exchange numbers, because apparently cellphones are popular in the troll community. Mabel has some matching necklaces in mind that would be helpful in case they got separated again. She says to give her a call some time, she’d be happy to bring them by free of charge.

When they part ways it’s to head in opposite directions, with the pair of trolls heading toward the mountains. With the sun just beginning to set and Mabel’s stomach starting to rumble, the walk to the Mystery Shack seems to take so much longer than ten minutes.

It’s quiet when she gets home, with the tours done for the day and the gift shop closing up. She waves to Grunkle Stan as he rummages around the kitchen in search of enough bread to make a few grilled cheese sandwiches, heads upstairs and hopes, just a little, in a distant sort of way, that Dipper is there instead of higher up, alone on the roof. She calls out to him and grins when there’s an answering shout from not too far away.

Dipper is sitting in bed with a plain old mystery novel propped open in his lap, which he quickly abandons when Mabel strolls into the room.

“You’re finally back,” He says, but he doesn’t sound impatient or annoyed about it, just pleased.

“I had a lot of social calls to make,” She jokes, though it’s basically true. Some of them just weren’t exactly pre-arranged, “ _And_ I’m going out again later.”

Dipper smiles at that, though it’s a wary thing. He’s already suspicious of who might be trying to sweep her off her feet, worrying that they’ll break her heart, “Well shoot,” He says, “How long are you sticking around?”

Mabel glances out the nearest window at the fading light. Not dark enough yet, “Hmmm a few hours. At least until after dinner.”

Dipper lights up at that, “Great,” He says, “Because I found this page in one of those books from the library that _might_ have a clue to the freestanding door behind the laundromat we were looking into.”

Mabel throws herself onto the bed beside him, beaming, “I’ve got stuff to tell you too,” She says, but before he can even open his mouth she gestures at him with one sleeve-covered hand, “You first though, you first!”

And Dipper grins. He pulls the library book in question out from the bottom of a stack of books at his side, with the most important pages already copied and pressed inside to bookmark their original location. He rattles off information about inter-dimensional travel and rifts in time-space and Mabel nods along, listening intently even when she doesn’t quite follow.

Dipper definitely needs time spent alone, but once he’s ready to be around people again _man_ does he talk. Mabel doesn’t mind being quiet for a while though. After a full day apart, a day spent meeting with her various supernatural friends, new and old, it’s nice to settle down for a little while next to her favorite paranormal pal of all.

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	17. The Author

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Still working on how to fit recent canon events into this canon divergent au. In any case, this chapter takes place when the twins are 14-ish. A short piece, taken from a prompt on tumblr.

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“What if he hates me?” Dipper asks, lying as flat as the tilt of the roof will allow.

Beside him, upside down but not floating, not at the moment, Mabel asks, “Who?”

“The author,” He says, and frowns at the setting sun. Who else?

Mabel makes a face, an exaggerated look of disbelief that she holds until she can convince Dipper to turn and look at her, physically grabbing the side of his face to get his attention, “For real? You’re worried what a crusty old guy thinks of you?”

“You don’t know for a fact that he’s crusty,” Dipper says, leaning away from her hand. There’s dried glue on her fingers, not quite dry enough, and the adhesive sticks and stays on his skin even as he pulls away, “And yes, I am. I’m kind of carrying on his legacy here, you know? Following his research, exploring his lab, going through his things. I hope I’m doing an okay job, is all,” Not screwing it up, he means. Not destroying years of work. Not embarrassing himself, “I hope he doesn’t mind.”

Mabel shrugs. With two years of experience with Dipper’s fixation on the author under her belt, she’s pretty well over the frustrating mystery of it all. She says, “He wanted _someone_ to keep up with his work, right? That’s why he left it all there. The journal wouldn’t be full of clues if no one was supposed to follow them.”

“That sounds like something I’d say.”

“It might be a direct nerd quote. Citation needed.”

Dipper sighs. He puts a hand over the book tucked into his jacket, the binding looser, more worn than it was when he first found it. He’s nearly lost a few pages here and there, to zombies and werewolves, to deep swamp water, but he’s managed to keep it all together. Even with Gideon trying to steal it and Grunkle Stan borrowing it that first summer, when the woods were full of eyes and the ground felt too far away and the cheap newspapers at the supermarket checkout warned of a very certain apocalypse, the journal has stayed intact.

And Dipper is pretty proud of that fact. It feels good to know he’s preserved the author’s knowledge, even if he hasn’t figured out all his secrets. There’s still interesting notes in there, facts to keep in mind and instructions to follow, though he isn’t quite so reverent of it as he was when he was younger.

The journal used to be law, a set of commandments he could just barely follow. Don’t go near the split oak tree next to the river during a full moon? Check. Always carry a mirror in case you need to test for vampires? Check. Trust no one? Sort of check.

He’s tried trusting no one, really he has, but it just never clicked. As careful and suspicious as he is, Dipper is trusting, too. He trusts Mabel for sure, and Soos, and Wendy, and even Stan, sometimes. He trusted Bill, once, only a little and even that was way too much. It’s something engrained in him, and he can’t tell if it’s his greatest flaw as an investigator or the only thing keeping him alive, keeping him together, as a person. Whatever it is, it’s not what the author would have wanted.

“He’ll probably be super impressed by you,” Mabel says eventually, and now she _is_ floating, soft as a cloud and surrounded by blueish light as she rearranges herself to sit up on the slanting roof, looking at the sunset from the proper angle, “Not only are you a paranoid monster hunter like him, you’re actually _part_ monster!”

Dipper winces. Mabel corrects.

“I mean,” She says, and looks at him instead of the setting sun, though he’s not nearly as colorful, “Well, you know what I mean. He seemed to have a lot of trouble with Bill, so if he finds out how you put one over on him, you’ll blow his mind,” She adds sound effects, dramatic whooshing and squelchy sounds, “That’s the way brains sound when they explode, probably.”

“Probably,” Dipper agrees, and sits up so he and Mabel are almost eye to eye, “I just hope he’s not, I don’t know…shocked? By all the,” He pauses, sets his eyes glowing and adds some jazz hands for emphasis, makes a mental note to never ever do jazz hands if he meets the author because he might literally die of embarrassment, “Magic stuff.”

“Pff,” Mabel says, and waves a hand dismissively, “Pfffff. Nah. The guy practically ate magic for breakfast.”

“Doesn’t mean he liked it,” Dipper says, though he doesn’t even have himself convinced of this. Even if the author was sometimes afraid of the things he studied, even if he ended up hating them, some part of him had to have been purely fascinated by the paranormal. He must have been excited, at least at the start.

“Well,” Mabel says, and she sounds very serious, highly reasonable, even as she starts stroking an imaginary beard in thought, “If the author shows up and he’s mad about everything, then I say you just banish him to another dimension.”

“I can’t do that, Mabel,” Dipper tells her, smiling in spite of himself, “On physical _and_ moral grounds.”

“Then at least banish him to the other side of town! To the bus stop, maybe. You can do that.”

Dipper looks at his hands, flexes his fingers so they light up with harmless blue fire, “Um. Maybe I could get him to the end of the driveway?”

“Good enough!” Mabel shrieks, and a few of the shingles to the left of them shift out of place, one cracked piece tumbling down over the edge of the roof. They each grab onto the unsteady surface beneath them, in case the whole thing goes, as if they could stop it.

They sit very still and the world is quiet, calm as the sun sinks behind the high tree tops, leaves them in twilight. Nothing else falls.

“There are way more shocking things, you know,” Mabel says, more quietly, breaking the silence. She looks down at the collection of smooth stones and metal settings strung around her neck, all inactive for the moment.

“More shocking than magic jewelry and weird triangle powers?”

Mabel considers. She shrugs, “Sure,” She says, looking at Dipper now, with the dull glow of his eyes lighting the space between them, “You could be like, a scary-cool intangible demon with wings and fangs and stuff. I could be _pregnant!_ With **_triplets_**! Whoa-ho! Talk about a shock!” Her eyes go wide, dazzled by the thought, “Actually, that doesn’t sound too bad….”

“Better you than me,” Dipper says, grimacing.

 Mabel laughs and lays back down again, mindful of the shifting tiles beneath her. She starts counting off baby names on her fingers, more than three, and a new set from the last ten times Dipper has heard her talk about her potential offspring. Now she has new considerations; which names hold very real power, which enchanted gems she’d give them for protection, whether her future spouse will be human or not.

Dipper doesn’t think about baby names, or magic stones, or even all the alternate universes where he might be all powerful or only a ghost or finally discovering the truth of it all, the way he always dreamed of. He watches the night set in and doesn’t glow much at all, and wonders whatever happened to the man who wrote the journal he’s got tucked away in his jacket.

There are still questions unanswered, still a man with a million secrets out there, somewhere, closer than expected and farther away than anyone could imagine. Even now there are eyes in the woods, and from up here the ground is very far away. There is still an apocalypse coming, someday, inevitably. But not tonight.

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	18. The Role Model

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another tumblr prompt!

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“Wendy guess what,” Mabel insists, and Wendy cannot even begin to guess what.

If Mabel is involved, there are an infinite number of possibilities as to what the ‘what’ might be. Anything could follow that statement, an announcement of campaign plans or of a marriage proposal or the discovery of a long lost artifact or just a burst of glitter. It could be anything, and frankly Wendy is on board for all of it.

“What?” She asks, just as smiling and indulgent as she was when the Pines twins were twelve and she was the coolest teen they knew, even if she’s only gotten older since then and they’ve sort of overtaken her position as biggest teenaged trouble makers in Gravity Falls.

“Ok so you can’t tell anyone,” Mabel begins, and scoots closer across the front steps to get close to her, “Not even Dipper, ‘cause he’d flip,” She grins a retainer smile, pink with gloss around the lips, and the unspoken fact that Dipper flipping out might result in the shack physically flipping over is acknowledged with mutually raised eyebrows.

“Check it out,” Mabel says in a whisper, and lifts the hem of her sweater just enough to show a sliver of skin, a flash of something metallic glinting in her belly button.

“Holy-” Wendy starts to say, and throws a hand over her mouth, catching herself before she says anything that wouldn’t fly with standards and practices. Even if the Pines kids aren’t kids anymore, she can’t get out of the habit of censoring herself around them.

“I did it myself,” Mabel tells her, whisper pitching higher with giddiness, “Standard protection stone,” She drops the hem of her sweater to cover the piercing, grinning victoriously.

And Wendy isn’t sure what to say. Secret piercings are kind of new territory, as far as their Girl Talks (sometimes just Talks, depending on Wendy’s mood,) are concerned. On the one hand it’s badass, but on the other it’s a secret piercing that Mabel _put in herself_ and that sounds kind of dangerous and kind of like a thing that would make Dipper, Stan, and probably her parents flip out for sure.

Wendy isn’t sure when she became the kind of person who worried about teens doing dumb dangerous shit. Not too long ago she was doing dumb dangerous shit herself. Not too long ago she was tattooing a summoning symbol behind Mabel’s ear and laughing about it. God does she feel old.

She settles somewhere in the middle of her mixed feelings, stunned to smiling and only slightly concerned, “Dude, that’s sick,” She says, then, more carefully, “Is it okay? Like, not infected or anything? Because I remember Tambry piercing her ears with a safety pin in sixth grade and she screwed it up _so_ bad.”

Mabel sticks out her tongue, “Gross! No, I did it the right way. I’ve got a bunch of piercing equipment now. I could permanently bedazzle myself if I wanted!”

Wendy raises an eyebrow, silently asking where and how Mabel got a _bunch_ of piercing equipment, and Mabel wiggles her eyebrows in response, her face a perfect impression of Stan’s conman grin.

So Wendy doesn’t ask about the equipment. She doesn’t say anything to betray her uncomfortably grown up concerns. She takes a deep breath and thinks that teenagers do wild stuff all the time, especially the Pines, and that she shouldn’t worry anyway.

“Are you going to?” She asks, and when Mabel’s expression twists to confusion, says, “Bedazzle yourself.”

“Oh,” Mabel says, and nods her understanding. She reaches up to touch the piercings in her right ear, just two so far, looking thoughtful, “I don’t know. Probably? There’s definitely room for more sparkle here.”

“Definitely,” Wendy agrees. She can’t imagine what Mabel’s sparkle limit is, if she even has one. There’s already a set of silver moons hanging from her ears, and tiny blue stones set behind them like crystal planets. She’d put a galaxy’s worth of decoration on her ears if she could, Wendy thinks, “Would you do more than your ears though?”

Mabel considers. She pokes at her lower lip and says, “I don’t know…I just got most of the metal out of my mouth. I’m not sure I need any more,” She grins when Wendy laughs, adds, “My eyebrows could use a little pizazz though, right?” 

Wendy shrugs, “If that’s what you’re into, dude.”

“For magical reasons, of course,” Mabel says, like it’s a good excuse, like she even needs an excuse, “Why pass up magical eyebrows? Well, maybe just one magic eyebrow. I’ve got this golden all seeing eye thing I picked up, ah…somewhere. Anyway, I think you’re supposed to put it like, in your eye. Like, _instead_ of your eye-”

“Ew.”

“Yeah, I’m not doing that. But I want to try and take it apart and rework the metal so I can wear it _over_ my eye and see if it still works.”

“Sounds like as good a reason to pierce your eyebrow as any,” Wendy reasons, shrugging.

Mabel’s smile falters, just a little, “Or I could just make it a monocle,” She says. She looks younger, the way Wendy remembers her from several summers ago, as she hesitates, asks, “How much is too much? For piercings, I mean.”

“I didn’t think you knew the meaning of ‘too much,’ Mabel,” Wendy jokes, but when Mabel’s flattened out smile slips closer to a frown, she puts her serious hat on.

See, this is where Wendy doesn’t so much mind feeling weirdly grown up and responsible, because Mabel is teenaged and Wendy’s older opinion matters. She vividly remembers Mabel at age twelve, looking for advice, chewing her own hair in nervousness over whether or not boys would like her. She’s changed since then, grown up for sure, but that touch of insecurity stays.

“Mabel, dude, you could rock like, twenty piercings,” She says, “Or just keep it to the ones you’ve already got. It’s your skin, so do whatever you want with it.”

“Hmm,” Mabel pokes at her left eyebrow, unsure.

“You know what you _should_ do,” Wendy says, and grins when Mabel looks to her, intrigued, “Is put on like, fifty fake piercings just to try out. And also to give Stan and Dipper a heart attack.”

Mabel grins with her then, eyes bright with possibility. She squishes her own face between her hands, delighted, “Wendy, you’re an evil genius.”

Wendy isn’t going to argue the point, “Though for the record, an all seeing monocle doesn’t sound half bad either.”

Mabel hops up off the step abruptly, saying, “I know, right? Hold on, I’ll bring it down and show it to you!” Then she’s gone, into the house, leaving Wendy alone on the front steps.

She doesn’t mind waiting. She half-expects that Mabel will come back with an armful of faux-piercings for them to try on together, and if that’s the case she’ll be happy to spend some time being fake-pierced. Even if she’s grown up and responsible and a role model now, she’s still on board for all of Mabel’s wild teenaged weirdness.

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	19. The Roots

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From another tumblr prompt; I was asked if trans Pines twins were canon for this au and yes, they are. Trans twins is one of my favorite Gravity Falls headcanons and I've had it in the back of my mind for the entirety of this project. So, to confirm, in the Magic Twins universe, Mabel and Dipper are both trans.

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“Um. Mabel?”

A half-step behind her, just around the base of the second largest tree on the section of undeveloped land strung with signs to announce that it belongs to the Northwests, Pacifica’s voice is hesitant. Strange. Pacifica isn’t usually one to hold back whatever’s on her mind.

Mabel looks over her shoulder, blowing a bright pink bubblegum bubble in the most questioning way she can manage.

Pacifica watches her pop it between her teeth, hesitating again. She asks, “Is Dipper aware that he has some kind of weird growth on his leg?” Mabel follows her gaze to where her brother stands, twenty feet ahead and examining a suspiciously mouth shaped hole in the trunk of a tree, “Or should we, like, tell him?”

Mabel sees the problem; packer down the pant leg, Dipper hyper-focused on woodgrain fangs dripping with sap, paying no attention to his own lower half. Easily fixable. She shouts across the space between them for Professor Dippingsauce of the Freaky Tree University to adjust himself. He’s in the presence of _ladies_ for goodness sake!

Dipper jumps at her voice, flushes up to his ears. He ducks behind the creepy mouth tree, grumbling about Mabel waking the dead and alerting the neighborhood and yeah, okay, thanks for the heads up.

Mabel looks back to Pacifica with a smile and a shrug; sometimes you just have to let your brother know his parts are out of order, you know? He’d do the same for her, probably more discreetly, but he’s always been better about using his “inside voice.”

“Ladies,” Dipper is muttering, sarcastic as anything, when he emerges from behind the tree and resumes his investigation. He’s more interested in the possibility of filling a new page in his own personal journal of supernatural findings than he is grumpy about helping Pacifica with another one of her family’s problems, but he still is a _little_ grumpy. Even if he has warmed up to Pacifica over the years, he isn’t very fond of her parents.

Mabel can’t blame him on that one though; she doesn’t much like Mr. and Mrs. Northwest either. They’re snooty and mean and they never learn from their mistakes _and_ they ground Pacifica like, all the time now, for no reason at all. Well, maybe some reasons. Maybe because she talks back now. Maybe because she keeps sneaking around with those common, terrible “Magic Twins,” (Mabel giggles at the thought, out loud, while Pacifica looks at her funny.)

There’s a lot of interesting stuff on the Northwest’s land though, some dangerous stuff, and Dipper won’t turn down an offer to investigate it all, with Pacifica as an official Northwest escort of course. Mabel simply won’t turn down a chance to hang out with friends. It’s why she gifted Pacifica a grappling hook of her own for her last birthday, to make sneaking out of the house easier, and why she’s wandering around the woods with her now, playing like this is a fun little hike and not a potentially serious inquiry into why strangely localized earthquakes have been shaking this particular parcel of land lately.

“Uh oh,” Dipper says, as the tree he’s shoulder deep in begins to vibrate faintly.

“Not again,” Pacifica whines, and Mabel grins, grabs onto the nearest branch, ready for the ride.

The ground beneath them shakes, shifts, rolling like a carnival tilt-a whirl. Dipper holds onto the creepy tree for dear life, eyes alight, while Mabel clings to her branch, accidentally swallowing her gum. Pacifica doesn’t quite make it to a handhold. Soon she’s shrieking, tripping, falling over a root until she’s caught in glowing blue, held aloft. Even there she tips, twists a little, looking slightly nauseous.

When the tremors stop and everyone’s caught their breath, Mabel lets go of her tree branch and reaches out to Pacifica, helping her up just as the blue light surrounding her fades, leaves her to find her own footing.

“Ugh,” Pacifica says, pushing her hair out of her face one-handed, “Okay. Next time you guys try and save me, could you not do it at the same time? I felt like I was going to turn inside out.”

Mabel puts her hands up in defense, claiming innocence. She didn’t do anything! Not a single ring or hair accessory activated.

“That’s probably my fault,” Dipper admits sheepishly, “I thought I was holding you up alright though-“

Pacifica shakes her head, sticks a hand down the neckline of her shirt to grab at something hanging on a chain there, something Mabel recognizes once Pacifica pulls it out into the light, “This thing was pulling me _down_.”

And now it’s Mabel turn to be sheepish; that’s one of her pendants, one for balance, resolve. For grounding, she’d said when she offered it to Pacifica, kind of a joke. It did work though! Wearing it, Pacifica admitted she felt better standing up to her dad, being her own person.

Mabel didn’t think it’d try to balance her _that_ much.

“Well,” Dipper says, “At least you didn’t fall in the dirt.”

Pacifica makes a face like she’s been sucking lemons and Mabel can’t help but laugh. No harm done, right?

Dipper checks his watch, says, “I want to say we have twenty minutes until the next tremor but…these aren’t exactly reliable. They’re kind of all over the place, but they might be getting closer together.”

“You’ve been tracking them?” Pacifica asks, brushing herself off just in case any of the dirt Dipper mentioned managed to get on her anyway.

Of course he’s been tracking them; Dipper has a full page of notes on the quakes already, another on the creepy mouth tree, another full of theories as to how the two are connected. He flips this page around to show them, pointing to the word _roots_ , circled three times.

“It must be in the roots,” He declares, sounding very sure of this, “This tree is definitely the epicenter of the activity, and since the shaking is coming from _under_ ground, the roots are probably wrapped up in the reason why. Literally.”

Mabel nods her understanding. Dipper makes a good point. Also making a point? The thing in his pants. She clears her throat, nods toward the fly of Dipper’s pants, prompting another flustered response.

Dipper turns around quick, red faced, grumbling a round of complaints directed at himself.

Mabel thinks he should put this down in his notes too- mini earthquakes and precarious packers don’t mix well. She tells him so, only laughing a little, and with the utmost sympathy, and he takes to banging his head very gently against the bark of the creepy tree.

Mabel leaves him to it. She links arms with Pacifica, leading her away from Dipper and his new favorite tree. He would appreciate a little space, she thinks. He’d appreciate it if she wasn’t so loud, probably, so blunt, but that’s never been her strength. She makes a concentrated attempt to speak softer, feigning interest in an unrelated circle of trees a little further on down the trail.

She’s almost say it was a fairy ring, if she didn’t know better. This tiny clearing is man-made, probably for hunting, and long abandoned. The grass is high and beside her, Pacifica worries about bugs.

“If you could make a charm to repel ticks and mosquitos, you’d be set for life,” She tells Mabel. Set like she is, she means, absurdly rich. Too bad Mabel has a habit of giving things away for free.

Mabel chances a look behind them, sees Dipper crouching on the ground, studying the roots that tripped Pacifica up minutes ago. He’s got his notepad out and is writing something down so fast all the words run together.

“So, um,” Pacifica says, prompting Mabel to look back at her, but doesn’t follow up with anything. She’s still got her arm linked with Mabel’s, suspiciously okay with being so close, especially on a day that Mabel is coated in her most cloying candy body spray. She hesitates another minute, seeming stuck on the words, till she says, “So we all know each other pretty well now, right? We’re acquainted.”

Mabel snorts a laugh at her choice of words, corrects her without batting an eyelash; they’re _totally_ friends.

“Right,” Pacifica says, and is she blushing? She might be blushing. Mabel’s half-tempted to drag her back over by Dipper and leave the two of them to be big embarrassed nerds together, “We’re…friends. Now. And like, friends talk about…things?”

And stuff, Mabel assures her. She tightens her hold on Pacifica’s arm a little, in case the matter at hand is difficult, dark, in case this talk is serious.

“So is all the trans stuff on the table or am I not supposed to go there?”

Mabel blinks in surprise, not immediately sure what to say. It’s not a question she expected and not one she’s given much thought to recently. All the trans stuff is just…it just is. It’s been commonplace for them even before they set foot in Gravity Falls. It’s just part of what makes them who they are, just another thing that they share. Like the magic stuff. It’s not a secret or anything. She reminds Pacifica of this.

“I know,” Pacifica says, and she looks suddenly very interested in studying her most recent manicure, “It’s not like I go around talking to people about it anyway. Or talking to people at all. Ew.”

Mabel smirks; you can take Pacifica out of the snotty Northwest lineage, but you can’t take the snotty Northwest out of Pacifica.

“I mean more like, talking to you guys about it. I didn’t say anything to Dipper before…” She trails off, jerks her head back in his direction, silently referring to past events, “I didn’t want to be rude.”

Pacifica sounds uncomfortable and Mabel could just about squish her face at how sweet and strange it is to see her being even marginally thoughtful.

“There is such a thing as social convention,” Pacifica says flippantly, like she isn’t a ball of nerves, like she hardly cares about the feelings of two people who are totally her friends.

Mabel grins. She’s familiar with social, not so much on the convention.

“I just don’t want to screw anything up,” Pacifica says, and looks to Mabel guiltily. With good reason. Mabel can remember every insult Pacifica has ever hurled at her, could recite the comments on her wardrobe and her hair and her name and her voice and her family- but those are in the past. Those words hit, and they hurt, but she’s outgrown them. They all have.

Mabel tells Pacifica she’s a doofus, less an insult and more of an affectionately stated fact, and laughs at Pacifica’s slightly horrified expression. She tells her not to worry so much, and that nothing is really off the table between the two of them anymore, but that she should probably talk to Dipper one on one to see what he’s comfortable with.

Pacifica winces, uncertain, and though she opens her mouth to respond, a shout interrupts her. A squeaky, shaken sort of shout. They break the link between their arms, turn together to see Dipper trying to steady himself on ground that isn’t so much shaking as writhing, twisting under his feet.

“Yup,” He calls over, triumphant and only a little unnerved, “Roots!”

Mabel reaches for the bedazzled Swiss army knife in her back pocket, thinking she should have brought a machete instead. As the ground begins to shake again and Dipper swears under his breath about uncooperative equipment, Mabel looks to Pacifica, promises to pick this conversation up later, when they’re back on steady ground.

Pacifica braces herself and the pendant around her neck as the far-reaching roots of the tree creep out of the ground and shift the earth, jokes, “Your place or mine?”

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	20. The Crash

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter came about as a commission- and a really fun one to work on, too!  
> For more information on my writing commissions, feel free to check out my tumblr [right here!](http://jalules.tumblr.com/post/118249127581/jalules-vaguely-desperate-writing-commission-post)

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Seated comfortably in the most sunken-in part of the cushion in his favorite chair, Stan Pines is attempting to read a newspaper. It is no easy task when long strands of brown hair keep draping over the very tops of the pages, knocking into his hat, creeping down his neck to make him shudder and shake them off, leaving behind sensations like bugs crawling down the back of his shirt.

“You know you can just read the paper online, right?” Mabel is asking him as she floats by, hair hanging in a wavy curtain behind her as she hovers, one of those magical doohickeys around her neck and a lazy smile on her face, “Like, all the papers. Every paper in the world, probably!”

She tips her head back to look at him upside-down and Stan frowns, huffs in response, “I don’t trust computers,” He reminds her, and brushes a strand of hair out of the way of a headline about the polar ice caps.

Mabel shrugs. She floats up higher, thankfully taking her hair with her, and Stan is free to scan the next few pages for news that looks out of the ordinary or potentially lucrative. He’s dreading one, hoping for the other.

“Wow Grunkle Stan,” Mabel says with a laugh, and Stan doesn’t have to look up to know she’s close to the ceiling, glowing something unearthly and swaying with eerie weightlessness, “You’ve got some serious dust bunnies up here- a whole family of them! This one looks like a…hm. Maybe a Chad? I’m thinking Chad.”

Stan grits his teeth, regrets it when the lower denture plate shifts, presses precisely in the spot he had his jaw broken thirty years ago by a man with a scorpion tattoo, and nearly-broken twenty years before  _that_ , falling out of a bunk bed mid-tussle, “Y’know,” He says, looking very hard at his newspaper, “If you’re gonna be doing that in the house, you might as well dust the tops of the doorways while you’re up there.”

Mabel hums uncertainly behind him. She asks, “Have  _you_  ever dusted the top of the doorways?”

No he most certainly has not. He’s never even thought about the dust on top of the doorways until just now. But then, he’s never spent time floating around the house with all the dust at eye-level.

“What’s that old saying?” He muses, “‘Do as I say, not whatever else you’re runnin’ your mouth about’?“

“Pretty sure that’s not it,” Mabel says, and her voice is closer, right over his shoulder. When he glances up she’s hovering just overhead, “If you don’t like me floating in the house I  _could_  just come down.”

Stan narrows his eyes behind his glasses. That’s a threat if he’s ever heard one, even if Mabel is smiling sweet as anything when she says it. If she comes down now she’ll land right on top of him, and there’s no way his aching joints can handle a sudden armful of great-niece.

“Kid,” He says, sternly, “If you fall on me, my hip’ll snap like a corn chip. Have fun explaining  _that_  one too your parents.”

Mabel laughs, just enough to make him smile too, and waves a dismissive hand in his general direction, “Oh psh, Grunkle Stan. Your hips are fine. You’re practically in your prime!” She floats down slow then, settles with one foot on the floor and the other held aloft, with her arms around his shoulders in something like a hug, “I bet you could still take on an army of the undead, even.”

Stan scoffs. He knows damn well his days of fighting off zombies are over. The most daring thing he’s done recently is change a lightbulb, and even then he managed to put his back out.

No, he’s not exactly fit to be an ass-kicking supernatural hero anymore. That’s up to the kids now. His protective great uncle abilities are limited to menacing neighborhood twerps who start trouble at the gift shop or plot to find out how much of Mabel’s bra is stuffed or make Dipper second guess himself about all kinds of things he should be more sure of. That stuff’s less about ass-kicking and more about well-placed water balloons and smoke and mirror tricks that’ll make even the most hardened teenage delinquent think there’s something after their soul.

“Maybe an undead squirrel or somethin’,” Stan says, to appease her, though he doubts this himself. The squirrels around town are  _nasty_ , “Speaking of small, fluffy, terrifying things- where’s Dipper? I don’t trust the two of you when you’re not together. It means trouble going in two different directions.”

Mabel smirks at that, clearly proud of her designated status as one half of the trouble in Gravity Falls, “He took the golf cart out to look for some big snake thing.”

Stan tenses at that, shoots Mabel a suspicious look. Big snake things aren’t good things. And moreover, “The  _new_  golf cart?”

“Well yeah, he wasn’t gonna take the broken-” Mabel’s voice cuts out, the thought lost. Her hands tense at Stan’s shoulders, holding on, and when she speaks again it’s softly, almost afraid, “Something’s wrong,” She says, “Dipper is-“

Stan’s heart stutters in a way that can’t be healthy, not at his age, and he whips around to see Mabel staring ahead at nothing, brow furrowed in concern.

“Dipper is what? What’s the matter?”

But Mabel doesn’t answer and suddenly Stan’s grip on his newspaper is tenuous, the paper itself isn’t there, is disappearing before his eyes, taking the living room with it. The chair underneath him turns to emptiness, to light and space that’s there and gone in the blink of an eye, a flash of something indefinable before anything is real and solid again.

Damn kids and their summoning circles.

When everything settles there’s grass under his feet, a stretch of asphalt not too far off, and trees for miles. Mabel’s arm is linked with his, half-helping him stand as they take in their new location. The landscape is vaguely familiar, the mountains all the same, just from a different angle than they’re used to. They’re not far from home, but not exactly a stone’s throw either.

About twenty feet away, Stan’s new golf cart is run halfway up the side of the tree, a thin wisp of smoke wafting from its damaged engine.

Right in front of them is Dipper, sitting on the side of the road with a hand held to his head like it’s hurting, like he’s thinking too hard. He jumps up at their arrival, sensing his sister behind him, and his eyes are wide, glowing, panicked.

“Oh thank-“ He starts to say, and stops. He looks to Mabel first, then to Stan, then to the ruined golf cart down the road, “What is Stan doing here?” He asks, voice pitching higher with nerves, cracking. There’s an impressive bruise blooming on his cheek and the glow in his eyes is lingering in a way that Stan doesn’t like.

“It was an accident,” Mabel says, quick, and once Stan is standing on his own she steps away, grabs Dipper by the shoulders, “You  _summoned_  me I couldn’t exactly- oh whatever, are you okay?”

Dipper opens his mouth, shuts it again. He seems to struggle to find the right words,  _any_  words. He gestures helplessly toward the totaled golf cart, his eyes still glowing.

“Are you hurt?” Mabel tries again, turning frantic as she looks her brother over from top to bottom. Even before he answers she nods to herself, sure that he’s safe. When he confirms it she just smiles, relieved, right. She’d know it if he were really hurt- Stan gets that.

“I’m fine,” Dipper says, less sure. He moves out of Mabel’s hold, puts his arms around himself instead, “I’m fine- I’m okay. I just crashed the golf cart, is all. Into a  _tree_.”

The  _new_ golf cart, Stan doesn’t add. He’s sure Dipper’s got that in mind already.

“I’m sorry,” Dipper says, looking at Stan now, looking pained to even say the words, “I screwed up- I  _totally_  screwed up. There was this snake coming after me and I swerved to get away from it but I jumped dimensions and ended up over here and then suddenly there was a tree and- and. I’m  _so_ sorry.”

Stan looks past him, to the churned up grass and scuffed tree bark and mangled golf cart. He thinks that he’s probably cursed to never own a miniature vehicle that doesn’t get destroyed. He thinks it’s replaceable too though, in a way that a great-nephew definitely isn’t. He gives Dipper the sternest, most serious look and asks, “Did you kill anybody?”

Dipper looks horrified. The glow in his eyes pulses, brighter, “Did I-“ He starts to repeat the words, shakes his head, like he can’t process them, “What? No! No I didn’t kill anybody!”

“Then it can’t be that bad,” Stan reasons. And, to his surprise, Dipper relaxes a little. He looks back at the scene of the crash, wincing at the sight, then back to Stan, apologetic.

“But the cart,” He begins to say, the light in his eyes wavering, but Stan shakes his head.

“I’ll take care of it,” He says, and puts his hands on his hips while he looks over the bent metal from afar, assessing the damage like he’s in a used car lot and not the middle of nowhere. Throw a few fake bites mark on there, he thinks, and he could put it in the shack as evidence of some kind of monster attack. A…fanged yeti or something. Sure. Some sucker is bound to go for that.

“Dipper,” Mabel says gently, putting a hand on her brother’s shoulder, “Your eyes.”

“I know,” Dipper says in a whisper, like it’s a secret and not something uncomfortably obvious “It’ll stop when I calm down.”

Stan pulls a face at that; fat chance of Dipper ever being anything even vaguely resembling calm. Not that minds- he just wishes the kid could quit the glowing eye thing. Frankly, it gives him the heebie jeebies.

“Try some breathing exercises,” Mabel suggests, and for a moment Dipper breathes with her, looking unconvinced as they both draw a breath in, hold it. Another car appears in the distance though, looking suspiciously like a police cruiser, and Dipper lets his breath out in a muffled curse that Stan echoes, louder and more colorfully.

“Oh no,” Dipper says, and his eyes glow brighter as his soothing breaths fall apart, turn short and sharp like he might hyperventilate, “Ohhhh no I’m so screwed. I’m gonna be in so much trouble. You’re not supposed to take those things out on the road! Or  _crash_ them!”

“Maybe we can just teleport away before anybody sees!” Mabel says, looking hopeful, but Dipper’s current level of alarm doesn’t give Stan a lot of faith in that plan. The kid can hardly keep himself upright and in one piece when he’s  _not_ a ball of nerves. There’s no way Dipper’s going to teleport himself, his sister,  _and_  Stan back home right now. Definitely not before the police officer who’s currently slowing down and pulling off to the shoulder of the road catches sight of them. They’re sitting ducks out here. Sitting, suspiciously glowing ducks.

Stan thinks of how police don’t take kindly to dumb kids pulling stunts with their great-uncle’s golf carts. He thinks of how folks outside of Gravity Falls might not take too kindly to the sight of a boy with glowing eyes, one who might just accidentally flip them on their head or open up another dimension if you get too close too quick or scare them into thinking they’re going to jail.

He can’t help but imagine a hundred scenarios in which the kids are found out, sought out, locked up or looked into or experimented on or used for something unholy and he’s been down this line of thought before, has sat awake at night looking for lights in the distance and counting the ticks of the clock and dreading these unlikely imagined possibilities just as much as he dreads the very real, very inevitable things that are creeping up on him, a little nearer every year.

There are some things that can’t be stopped, but this isn’t one of them.

Dipper turns away from the cop car, shielding his face to cover the glow of his eyes, muttering something that sounds an awful lot like a plea for the ground to open and swallow him completely. Right at his side, Mabel looks slightly less hopeful. She’s steeling herself to put on her brightest smile even if she’s not feeling it, probably thinking she’s going to have to be the one to sweet talk her way out of this.

Neither of these are things Stan can stand for. He puts a hand on Dipper’s shoulder, tells him again, firmly, “I’ll take care of it.”

When Mabel looks at him questioningly he winks, a silent communication that might be an uncle-niece thing or maybe one half of a set of twins to another thing, or maybe just something specific between their kind of people; the charmers.

Because while Stan Pines might be too old and aching to fight off hordes of zombies or even change a lightbulb on his own, he’s still got plenty of tried and true skills on hand, ones he uses every day of his life. He’s a tired old conman, but a conman just the same. Getting out of traffic violations is small potatoes compared to half the stunts he’s pulled. And doing it to protect his kids? All the better.

Dipper’s eyes are losing their glow, taking on a familiar warmth while Mabel puts an arm around him, whispers something private and soothing that Stan doesn’t dare to listen in on. The cop car on the shoulder of the road is parked, engine off, and the driver’s side door is opening, a grim-faced man stepping out. He’s no Blubs, but he’s not the toughest looking nut Stan’s had to crack.

Readying himself with a sly grin and a tall tale already coming together in his mind, Stan steps up, calm and collected as though there isn’t a wrecked golf cart faintly smoking not too far away and a pair of vaguely suspicious teenagers at his side. He asks, “What seems to be the problem officer?”

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“That was incredible,” Dipper says later, walking up the path to the Mystery Shack after their complimentary ride home via police cruiser. As far as the cop knows, Stan is a respected member of the community and went to the same college as his own beloved uncle, neither of the kids was driving at the time of the accident, and in fact the whole situation was the result of malfunctioning golf cart equipment and some unexpected wildlife intervention.

“Grunkle Stan’s lies are a work of art,” Mabel agrees, beaming.

And Stan smiles, proud. There’s plenty of bad to be said about him, that’s for sure, but no one can claim he isn’t at least an  _impressive_  liar.

“I can’t believe he actually bought the bit about the condor,” Dipper says, laughing with relief. He’s stepping lighter, but not floating off, not slipping away to someplace unknown. He’s just grounded enough to be where he ought to, and Mabel’s presence close to his side probably doesn’t hurt matters any.

“The part where you improvised an ancient prayer of protection from birds of prey was great,” Mabel says, looking to Stan admiringly.

“And surprisingly accurate,” Dipper adds, and before he can think too much on that, Stan is reaching over to displace his hat and ruffle his hair. The kid sighs like he’s getting too old for this, and Stan doesn’t care in the slightest.

“That was hardly even a fib,” He says, and pauses as Mabel gives him a hand up the front steps, mindful of his bad hip, “You wanna hear a  _real_  lie, remind me to tell you about the time I got caught in the basement of a taffy shop-slash-money laundering operation with a pair of angry emus and one hell of a pulled hamstring.”

Mabel narrows her eyes at him, uncertain, “I can’t tell if that’s the lie or the story…”

“Precisely,” He says, and holds the front door open for her to step inside. She’s already bouncing with anticipation for what the rest of the tale might hold, delighted that it includes animals and candy.

“I’ll make story telling tea!” She announces, taking off into the kitchen, and Stan and Dipper share a concerned glance. Strawberry iced tea with a hint of lemon and a garnish of freshly shredded book pages isn’t the worst drink Mabel’s concocted in recent years, but the soggy paper is one hell of a pain to clean out of your glass.

Stan shrugs, resigned to a fate of picking Times New Roman out of his dentures, and holds the door for Dipper too, since he’s there, since the kid is hesitating.

“Hey, um,” Dipper says, standing awkwardly just inside the doorway. He’s taller than Stan like this, on the half-step up, but he looks like a little kid again when he’s embarrassed, “Thanks. For talking to the cop and taking the blame for the golf cart and everything.”

“It was the condor’s fault,” Stan corrects, only half-joking. If you commit to a lie you’ve got to commit fully. Anybody asks him ten years from now what happened to his second golf cart, he’s giving them the whole nine yards of bullshit, imaginary birds and all.

“Right,” Dipper says, and nods knowingly. He’s still tense, just a little, more so now that Mabel’s gone inside and he doesn’t have a foil to bounce his anxiety off of, to tease him into smiling. He clears his throat, asks, “You’re not gonna tell mom and dad, right?”

Stan raises his eyebrows over the frames of his glasses, considers. The kids’ parents are going to ask questions if they come to pick them up at the bus station and Dipper’s still got that bruise on his cheek. There’ll be another round of lies to tell, these ones more personal, more dangerous.

Dipper’s expression turns pleading as he steps back down to Stan’s level, lowers his voice to a frantic whisper, “They’ll never let me get my license for real if they know about the- the dimensional blinking thing, and I’m  _really_ going to try to get a handle on it! I’ve almost got it under control, it’s just-“

Stan puts up a hand and Dipper falls silent.

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Stan assures him, and Dipper’s shoulders sag with relief. His eyes are like his sister’s, like his mother’s, and though he’s gotten used to their occasional glow, Stan is glad to see his great-nephew looking so normal, so calm.

“Thanks Grunkle Stan,” Dipper says again, quiet, and ducks into the Shack without another word.

Stan takes the half-step up on his own, one hand braced against the frame of the door so his hip, his back, only ache a little. He can hear Mabel singing some sugary pop song in the kitchen, each verse punctuated by Dipper’s request for her to please stop, and he knows there’s no way he’s going to be able to get back to reading his newspaper any time soon. But there’s a glass of iced tea with his name on it and a story to tell to a pair of fast-growing kids who are constantly getting away with too much, kids after his own heart.

He figures the paper can wait.

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	21. The Club

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“Okay so, teleportation? Doesn’t exactly agree with me.”

On Dipper’s right, stepping just out of reach, Pacifica is getting her footing, looking slightly dazed. It’s her first time traveling instantaneously from one point in time and space to another, and Dipper can’t blame her for being dizzy. Though they’re in the shack, exactly where Dipper intended them to be, and the trip was as smooth as inhumanly possible, there’s never any guarantee that magic will treat a body kindly.

On his left, Mabel laughs.

“It takes some getting used to,” She says, skipping gracefully away like she’s walking on air. She turns around to grin at her brother, a silent congratulation on the small victory of getting them all here in one piece, “Dipper used to puke like crazy whenever he tried to go more than like, two feet.”

Dipper rolls his eyes at the exaggeration, looks to Pacifica and finds her cringing, swallowing hard. He _really_ hopes she isn’t the type to throw up from some interdimensional turbulence because the bathroom is pretty far away and there are no garbage cans in sight and he doesn’t think Grunkle Stan will take too kindly to someone barfing into one of his fake bigfoot skulls.

“I can see why,” Pacifica says flatly, and sits down gingerly on the armrest of Stan’s chair. Dipper can’t tell if she’s being careful because she feels sick, or just because she doesn’t want to sit too fully on unfamiliar and decidedly second-hand furniture.

“But,” Mabel says as she finger-combs her hair free of tangles, “He’s practically a pro now! All three of us in one trip is pretty impressive.”

Dipper shrugs, embarrassed at her attempts to cheer him on. Teleporting isn’t such a big deal anymore, even with multiple passengers. And they weren’t even in danger, just looking to get across town faster so Mabel could feed Waddles and change her outfit before they head out to follow up a lead on a nightclub bouncer who might _actually_ be bigfoot.

It’s always easier to teleport when he isn’t afraid he might die at any second. And working with Mabel is familiar territory, second nature. Even with Pacifica on board, presenting a somewhat unknown variable, it was an easy trip.

“But you have to know exactly where you’re going, right?” Pacifica asks, and for a moment her resting expression reads a little too close to scorn, has to be consciously tipped up into something vaguely apologetic, “Just curious.”

Dipper nods, mentally assuring himself she doesn’t mean anything by the question. She’s not judging him, just trying to understand. She doesn’t _mean_ to be a brat, it just happens sometimes, holdover from years spent following in her parents’ footsteps.

“Otherwise things get all higgledy-piggeldy,” Mabel says, half-laughing. She stops with her hands halfway through her hair, remembering why she needed to stop here in the first place, “Oh! Speaking of piggeldy; _Waddles_!” She calls the pig’s name at the top of her lungs, grinning at the answering grunt from upstairs, “It’s snack time!”

At that, Waddles comes clamoring down the stairs at top piggy speed, snuffling excitedly. He rushes past Dipper and Pacifica, disinterested, and straight for his best human friend. He follows Mabel into the kitchen, squealing along as she begins singing a list of snack time food choices loudly and off-key.

Dipper takes a seat on the armrest across from Pacifica’s, finally feeling the drain of moving three bodies through time and space begin to weigh on him. He needs a minute to collect himself. Maybe five. Ten to be safe. It’ll take Mabel at least that long to pick out a new sweater and matching accessories; something that says ‘nightclub chic,’ but also ‘magical detective casual.’

On the other side of the chair Pacifica shifts her footing, studies her designer shoes. She crosses and uncrosses her arms, filling the relative silence that Mabel’s absence has created with bored sighs and shuffling.

Dipper listens to her, just a few inches away, and to the more distant sounds of Mabel humming and moving things around in the fridge, and the ambient noise is surprisingly soothing. When Pacifica speaks again it’s a small shock of sound, closer than expected and still slightly unfamiliar in the confines of the Mystery Shack.

“Thanks,” She says, sounding unsure even as she forms the word, and Dipper turns around slightly to make sure he’s hearing her right, “For bringing me along, I mean. Teleporting and whatever.”

Dipper shrugs, wishes Mabel would re-enter the room in a flurry of bangles and baby carrot snack sticks. She’s better about accepting gratitude. Dipper fumbles the things he means to say, stammers when others are too sincere, when their focus is too great.

He says it’s no big deal, even though it is kind of a big deal, both in a magical powers sense and in an interpersonal one. Pacifica Northwest is territory he’s only just begun to learn to navigate without so much mistrust between them. In quiet moments, where neither of them are laughing or breaking rules or shattering expectations, they struggle. Without the buffer of color and noise that is Mabel, things can get awkward.

From inside the kitchen, the snack preparation sounds turn to proud cooing, punctuated by pleased oinking. Task one accomplished, Mabel leaves Waddles to his meal and hurries past Dipper and Pacifica again, talking from one room to the next nonstop, “Okay just one more minute lemme grab my necklace and that top I borrowed and change my socks-”

Her voice fades out of earshot as she runs up the stairs, and for a moment Dipper stares after here, wishing to follow, or to send Pacifica up there too. Girls like opinions on their clothes, right? Pacifica is bound to be a better judge of shape and color where skirts are concerned. She’d almost certainly rather be talking to Mabel about sandal styles than sitting quietly beside Dipper, waiting for her stomach to settle and his head to stop spinning.

He asks if she feels any better, to be polite and because he feels slightly, inexplicably, guilty.

She shrugs, nonplussed, “I’ll live. Mabel is right- I just have to get used to it. Like the taste of caviar, y’know?”

No, Dipper doesn’t know. He doesn’t think he _wants_ to know either.

“Why does magic do that though?” Pacifica asks, turning around on her arm of the chair so they’re closer, not quite face to face, “Like, make you sick or whatever? Do our bodies just reject things that are different, like with organ transplants and alien parasites?”

Dipper stares for a moment, unsure of what to say, and Pacifica’s cheeks tinge pink. There are certain phrases that he never expects to come out of her mouth; “organ transplants” and “alien parasites” are definitely two of them.

What’s worse is that he doesn’t have a good answer. He figures she’s right, at least partially, but there’s no telling for sure. There’s no _definitive_ study on the effects of dream demon powers on a human being, not even from the Author, so Dipper is kind of on his own in trying to understand this stuff. That thought is only slightly terrifying.

Upstairs, Mabel opens and shuts dresser drawers, walks to the nearest mirror and her footsteps are small, squeaking sounds against the old floorboards. Dipper twists himself around, facing forward, moving closer to Pacifica. He won’t share the chair with her- that’s his and Mabel’s thing, but each of them taking an armrest is good. It’s just enough personal space.

“None of Mabel’s magic junk has ever made me sick,” Pacifica comments, and shoots Dipper a sideways glance that is only slightly accusatory.

Dipper thinks that makes sense. Mabel’s magic is different than…than his deal. She’s got the kind of magic that people have been working with for centuries, the kind human beings have sought out since the beginning of time. She’s all gem stones and precious metals, whispered enchantments and pure hope.

As much as Mabel relies on physical items to work her magic, the power really comes from within. Mabel’s magic is based in her own belief and the way the she imbibes items _with_ that belief. She’s all about faith and trust.

“No pixie dust?”

Dipper sniffles despite himself, hopes that they never have to put up with pixie dust again. It’s useless stuff, and not at all worth the allergies he’d suffer through just to go out in it.

“And what’s your ‘deal?’” Pacifica asks, with carefully applied finger quotations, and Dipper gets the impression she’s trying to look less curious than she really is, “Some kind of…demon thing? Mabel told me something about dream triangles once but I don’t get it.”

Dipper looks from wall to wall, from one artificial artifact to another; anywhere but at Pacifica. His “deal” is embarrassing. His “demon thing” is something he doesn’t get either. He admits, haltingly, becoming suddenly very interested in studying his own hands, that he doesn’t have a very good understanding of his own powers, or a lot of control over them.

He wills his palms to glow, to hold a flaming illusion, and the flickering light that dances around the edges of his fingers is faint, but satisfying to see.

“Seems like you’re in control to me,” Pacifica says flatly, and Dipper isn’t sure if she’s mocking or praising him. She’s even harder to understand than demon magic sometimes, and that’s as incredible as it is frustrating.

He shrugs off the comment either way, sighing in exactly the self-deprecating that Mabel would scold him for.

His power _should_ be based in knowledge, certainties. Should be.

If you know the layout of the universe, you can manipulate it- that’s his thinking, anyway. But he’s only got half of what he needs; a new tool with no operating manual, another mystery to add to the constantly growing pile. Where he lacks knowledge he has to just, you know, _guess_. Every move he makes is an estimation, and a dangerous one. That’s why teleportation is tricky, why he has to know exactly where he’s going, why he gets lightheaded and sick to his stomach when reality bends too fast for him to catch up, and that’s probably why Pacifica is shaky after teleporting too. Their bodies just aren’t accustomed to all those unknowns.

So, yeah, dream demon triangle magic is kind of like an organ transplant, he reasons. Or an alien parasite.

And that’s his deal.

Dipper extinguishes the light around his hands, keeps staring at them anyway. The downstairs of the shack is quiet, with Waddles nibbling on the last of his snack inside the kitchen. Upstairs, Mabel shuts another dresser drawer, the pattern of her steps making it sound as though she’s walking in circles. Three times. Backwards, probably, if she’s activating a particular piece of jewelry.

“Good thing you’re a decent guesser,” Pacifica says eventually, and Dipper can’t help but smile.

The sound of Mabel coming downstairs makes them both look up, though once she steps into view Dipper’s hands are over his eyes, covering his face completely as he exclaims that Mabel _cannot_ just walk into a room with her shirt half on, especially not when they have company over.

“Oh hush,” Mabel says, waving a dismissive hand at him, unseen, before returning to the task at hand; adjusting her bra. This one is electric blue, with tiny pink polka dots, and when she gestures at her chest like a gameshow assistant displaying a fabulous prize, Pacifica nods her approval.

Mabel’s bust line is a recent development, appearing later than she would have liked with the help of some very handy hormones and surprisingly little magical interference. She has not yet settled on names for her breasts, but was horrified when Pacifica admitted she’d never even considered christening her own. They’re scheduled to look through a tome of ancient names next Thursday, an occasion that has been helpfully circled on Dipper’s calendar but which he has no plans to attend.

“Hot,” Pacifica says, and snorts in laughter when Dipper gives his heaviest sigh of discomfort.

“Gotta look good for potential sasquatches,” Mabel explains, pulling her sweater on the rest of the way. She aims a look at Dipper, waiting to see if he’ll uncover his eyes now, and when he grudgingly glances up at her between his fingers, she grins in victory. She mouths the words ‘twin telepathy’ at him, and reaches up to slip the backs onto her earrings. The silver-wrapped stones swing at her touch and keep moving, gently swaying, even when she’s standing still.

Dipper asks if she’s ready, gets a chirpy sound of agreement, and he and Pacifica both push themselves up off their armrest seats.

“So are we hoofin’ it or catching the bus or…” Mabel trails off, looking between the two of them, smiling when they glance at each other, both hesitating to answer.

Dipper doesn’t mind walking, or taking the bus, or letting Pacifica call her personal driver or-

“We could teleport,” Pacifica suggests, and seems slightly exasperated by Mabel and Dipper’s matching looks of surprise, “If you guys want, I mean,” She raises an eyebrow, half-question and half-challenge, “If you’re up for it, Dipper.”

“ _Ohhh_ ,” Mabel says in mock-awe, as though some kind of gauntlet has been thrown. She turns to Dipper, eyes wide in hopeful anticipation, “You good for it, bro-bro?”

Dipper rolls his eyes at the nickname, but nods; of course he’s good for it. He thrusts out a hand for Pacifica to hold, his skin already alight with harmless flame, and she takes it. Mabel grabs hold of each of their arms then, closing the circle with a thrilled laugh.

“You _do_ know where we’re going, right?” Pacifica asks, maybe teasing, maybe just the tiniest bit concerned, and Dipper grins across at her.

Of course he knows where they’re going, more or less.

Pacifica holds her breath, looking worried as the color begins to fade around them, closing in, but Mabel nudges her in reassurance, whispers, trusting, certain, “We know where we’re going.”

Pacifica breathes out, relieved, as they detach from time and space together. In an instant, they’re gone.

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End file.
